Lookit!

The totally awesome Jaime K. of Save the Kales and Heart of SteelCity featured me and my work on Heart of SteelCity today.

Check it out!

Meltdown/Rebuild.

Unsurprisingly, I have been watching, like everyone else, the slope the American economy has been sliding down the last year or so. I am disheartened and worried and cynical and terrified about what the future holds for this country; I fret about my money as well as my future on a regular basis, even though I am relatively gainfully employed. I have seen and benefited greatly from, in my brief 24 years on this planet, a hugely prosperous upswing in the economy and watched, wide-eyed and stupid, as the foundation of the American way of life in late 20th and early 21st century fell out from underneath everyone. It is obvious to cite the 65 banks that have closed since 2008, note the bankruptcy and failures of GM and Chrysler as well as Ford's shortcomings, the deflation of the housing market and the joblessness that is reported back to me everyday.

It's all beating a dead horse, really. I can't say anything about the economic situation of the last 2 years that hasn't already been articulated and explored better than I can.

What I see in times of seemingly endless struggle, however, is re-examining the way Americans have been living the last 50 years. We have been ever-expanding outward; bigger, better, faster, newer without considering the consequences of the precious land and the vast, gorgeous history that has been sacrificed for our culture of empty, mindless buying and the inherently American need to own a piece of that land for ourselves.

I see the shift when I work out at the Rodale Institute, watching the expanding interest in organic, sustainable and local food. I hear about it when wind and solar energy is slowly starting to be the new go-to for powering our country, as opposed to fossil fuels.

So, when I read about Flint, Michigan's plans to shrink itself in order to save it, I was amazed. It sounds so counter-intuitive to what Americans think of as a means of prosperity and yet, by making a town (especially that has struggled so notoriously as Flint has) smaller makes so much sense. By bringing the town back to a center and making it more concentrated around that center, it becomes more sustainable, accessible and and economically viable. While I am not saying that decision to give up the house that one has worked so hard to make home is an easy one, to let go of the idea that "This is mine and it will always be mine" for the larger good of a failing community seems like a strange and refreshingly good idea.

Big Box Reuse is a photography project by Julia Christensen about the ways in which people and organizations have taken closed Big Box stores and re-imagined them into places of worship, art, community, health and learning. It is well known that the construction and openings of such places as Wal-mart and Home Depot kills local economies and businesses and to see the space that such places of huge consumerism once occupied reused and remade into a places of purpose is refreshing and inspiring.

Instamatic, LIFE.

Two things, which are shining examples of those things from the past coming back to impact the future.

Polaroid film. Instant, with those strange colors, is one object in photo-making who's manufacturing life has met it's end. The need for the instamatic camera and the one and only it spits out has radically diminished with the massive take-over of digital cameras. It is a niche market now, an object of the past that technology has eradicated.

Which is why I want to see The Impossible Project succeed this year. I am rooting for them.

Google's archives of LIFE magazine. This article published this week by the New York Times Magazine discusses the problem with Google's recently digitized LIFE photographic archive and it's lack of contextualizing details. In it, Heffernan explains why this lack of contextualizing evidence simplifies and softens the subject matter, how it doesn't explain the obsession with the Kennedy's and is sorely lacking the way the images were categorized. Imagine my delight at the job she is proposing for the particular photography lovers and aspiring librarians everywhere:

"If Google intends to get into the business of displaying photography, it needs to either encourage wiki curation or, more feasibly, to hire a team of people who understand photography to make the most of the raw material here. It’s a good time for it: many first-rate content providers who made their careers in old media (some who even understand the significance of Life photography) would be happy, one of these days, to get a call from Google."

I won't lie: my toes curled.

.org

After much hemming and hawing and dragging my feet, I finally managed to sit down and redesign the .org. I think it's a little sleeker, maybe. It's got new work up! With a new babbling artist statement! Tell me what you think: godshomemovies.org.

The world is slowly starting to thaw. New pictures lurk where snow once lay.

Yelp!

Y'all, when I was living in the great white New England, one of my favorite websites to peruse was Yelp. I found all sorts of new places to shop and to hang out that soon became some of my favorites. I was sad when I had to leave all the user-generated reviews behind and come back to searching google for stuff in the Lehigh Valley.

Well, imagine my delight when I was searching for my favorite health food store's hours today and came across their Yelp page. I was filled with e-joy. So, without much further ado, The Lehigh Valley's Very Own Yelp Page. Lehigh Valley-ites and readers, Go! Find things to do! Review your brains out! Tell people about your favorite car wash or dry cleaner, your favorite used bookstore and thrift store. The citizen's of the LV will be happier and well-informed because of it.

Linkage, for Lack of Real Content.

Between working 40+ hours a week, making new friends and sleeping, I haven't had much time for picture making. This weekend and Thanksgiving, hopefully, will change that. I am determined to make new images, dammit.

In the mean time, here's a few random links that I am really into right now.

First, if you haven't heard by now, Women in Photography shows amazing work done by, well, women. The put up new work every other Tuesday. I get so excited when I see it's title bolded in my Google Reader.

I also love image archives or any archive, really. I find myself hugely inspired by Documenting America and get lost in it's e-pages often. Imagine my chagrin when I read Google has joined up with LIFE to put up an archive of images from the magazine. Check it out and marvel at all the LIFE-photo goodness.

Totally unrelated to photography but directly related to art and design is Amy Lau's Dexter-inspired blood spattered dining room. Given my love of the show (and Michael C. Hall, thanks), I burst out laughing at the blood spattered plates and the dismembered silverware. If you have the cash, you can buy chairs, glasses and the a fore mentioned silverware at spring3d.net. What I wouldn't give for a chair. Or several. Or the wine glasses!

Outside Lies Magic.

Waiting Corn Stalks, Ruppsville Road.
A few weeks ago, I finished reading John Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic, book that encourages exploration of the everyday landscape to find the beauty and history that lies mostly ignored next to shopping malls, beyond the interstate and buried deep in the woods. I love Stilgoe's writing. I hold a deep wonder at the everyday, seemingly mundane world around me and to read someone else's thoughts and ideas, which have been thoroughly researched, is so exciting and inspires me to no end. I have been fingering and turning over the ideas he presents in Outside since I finished reading it at the beginning of the month, pondering over electrical lines and smiling to myself about the rails that crisscross and snake through the area around my house.

Stilgoe points to Sundays, the day of rest, as a good day for exploration. I woke up this past Sunday from a nap after a exciting weekend, filled with visits from much-loved people in my life, around 5.30pm. The air was brisk despite the warm weather. It was filled with the sharpness of autumn, with wood smoke. I glanced around the suburban neighborhood that I live in, listening to the quiet with the interstate out in the distance. That sound, that lovely sounds of dried leaves blowing, scraping along asphalt came with the stir of the breeze. I walked out past the neat houses, past the planned, curving roads to an intersection I know well. I caught the bus there my first two years of high school. When I first started the type of exploration that colors my life, there was a barn across the wide rural road. It sat behind a large oak tree. I often found myself inside this barn, walking along the cross beams, since the second floor had fallen in. The photographs I took on a particular, gorgeous snowy day hang in my parents' house now, the only records I have of the space.



Ruppsville Road, West Allentown.
The land was cleared for a development that was never built my senior year of high school. The land still stands empty and is currently used as a place for growing trees by a local nursery. I've watched 10 year old tress being pulled out of the ground, like an infected molar, from this field. On this day, however, there was no witness save for a fox, bounding across the road, pausing to watch me before disappearing into dead stalks of corn.

The houses along this stretch of road are, for the most part, older. Their history stretches back to when the area was wide, open cornfields and farms. They have witnessed the selling off of the land, to massive companies who put distribution centers that are miles long. Lightening rods extend just beyond the chimneys.





I Love These Houses.
The houses and their arrangement are the opposite of the place that I live in, less than a mile away. They sit close to the road. They are worn and small. I like to picture myself living in house like those that dot Ruppsville Road, tending a garden in the summer and holed up against the cold in winter. The cold that I am quietly excited for, as it means big sweaters and boots and the way snow makes the world still. For now I watch the leaves fall from trees and pull warm socks up to my knees.


The light was fading, disappearing behind the lip of the earth. Walking along the white line that marks the road, I lingered at corners, meandered onto the grass that lines the side of the road. I took everything in, letting the details settle into my head. A dog barked as I started off the road, toward the bright empty parking lot of one of those enormous distribution centers.


I was dumbfounded by the immense, dead space and the "nothingness" of the building, sitting so close to so many places with personal, quiet history. The massive structure was impersonal and so boring compared to the places I had just been admiring. So, I walked away and onward, eying the shining rails across the street.



Turnout.

I started really seeing railroads and the space around them after I watched The Station Agent, a gorgeous movie that follows a train-enthusiast and his story of moving to a small rural New Jersey town to live in an old train station. I started thinking about them because of Mr. Stilgoe, who has done quite a bit of work on them. I also started seeing them because of the surprisingly large amount of train enthusiasts who's photographs I print at work; their passion and consistency in which they obsessively photograph trains warms my picture-making, exploring heart. I find myself thinking about the rails after I bump over them in my car. As I scrambled up the fat gravel and stepped over the rails, I looked down the tracks in both directions, coming and going. I couldn't stop thinking about the small bits and pieces of railroad history that I've retained. The rails gleamed in the dying light as walked in step across the ties.

I headed home in the dark, my pace quickening. I stopped looking around and started moving quickly along the side of the road, glancing behind to watch for cars, since I stupidly wore a dark sweatshirt. Racing across the street to the development, I pondered dinner and Monday morning.

The Lone Ranger?

Apparently, there's a road in California that has grooves in it, carved by Honda, to reproduce the Lone Ranger theme song when driven on at 55mph.

Genius.

MOO!

I always find myself blabbering to people I don't know about my work. Sometimes, I suspect that it makes me seem interesting and it gives me something to talk about to people at parties, bars, laundromats, and other such public places when I am (as always) feeling awkward and misplaced. They, in turn, ask me if I have a website. This results in brief confusion over the website name and a "Oh, I'll totally remember that", knowing I missed out on an opportunity to get someone, anyone to look at my photographs, even if they are just my parents' friends with ties to art foundations in the L.V. or a family friend with links and access to the coal region.

I had 500 postcards printed up last spring for my senior show but carrying around 6x6 postcards all the time "just in case" is a huge pain in the ass. So, I said "Self, let's get some MOO cards so that when the conversation arises next time you have something to hand out!"

I personally think Flickr (if you don't know by now...) is one of coolest ways to catalog, share, print and use photos. God bless their little hearts for hooking up with companies like MOO and Blurb to make self publishing not only accessible and affordable but top quality.

I got my first set of MOO cards in the mail today and they are so awesome; they're like this little package of one hundred "Wee!"s. The color is pretty good, with virtually no color shift. They are, however, a little dense but they're not that far off from what I would want them to be. I had ten of my favorite Coal Hunkie shots cropped and made into cards. They're so adorable. I absolutely cannot wait until I get to hand them to people and to make another set with the stitched photos I've been working on. I also plan on taking advantage of Blurb at some point; it has the potential to serve up something awesome. Say, a book of this here blog, perhaps.

NYTimes Article: Coal Country Looks to Natural Gas

I get excited* when things that I know and love get mentioned in a national and international newspaper.

I get even more excited when it's a place that I know like the back of my hand.

The article is actually a depressing, quick look at the ever-declining anthracite coal industry and local government buildings looking to switch to natural gas (cheaper) to heat them. This means I probably shouldn't be so excited to see it on the "front page" of the NYtimes this evening but it points towards the main issue that I am/was interested in when I was making Coal Hunkie and the things I still think about and pay attention to when I go back there.

*It's more of a "Hey lookit! Someone's paying attention!" excited than a glee-filled excitement.

Six Links for Saturday.

These posts are no more than a glorified link dump. There will be six new ones every week. There is no logical order nor coherency.

01. Vanishing of the Bees. A film about the decline in the bee population. see also Allison Wallace's A Keeper of Bees.

02. Apophenia. A blog about e-life and it's impact on society. Interesting! Smart!

03. No Depression. A magazine that surveys the past, present and future of American music.

04. Switch Back Gravity Railroad. An effort to get the Switch Back up and running again. When I grow up, I will belong to a historical society.

05. A NYtimes story about Deer Hunting for Population Control in New Jersey. Interesting.

06. Laster's Art Shack. The Laster's are a family of three from Kentucky that produce phenomenal folk/outsider art. They are great artists and Ruby Elvis Rose is about the cutest thing you could ever imagine. Someday, I will have the pleasure to own one of their pieces or travel to see their homestead.

(Okay, Okay. It's not quite Saturday but I'm sleepy.)

Little/Big Steel: Bethlehem

Photo Credit: Jeremy Blakeslee

Since I started a welding class three weeks ago, I've been thinking a lot about metal, about steel. I've found myself suddenly inspired by the noisy metal shop at Mass Art, thinking about what I can make from sheets of steel, what sort of object can come from something so solid.

It led my brain directly to Bethlehem Steel, the company that provided the steel beams for Rockafeller Center, the Crystler and Empire State Buildings, as well as the Hoover and Grand Coole Dams and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the second largest steel mill in the United States, just after U.S. Steel out in Pittsburgh.

I could go on and on about the finer details of Bethlehem Steel but instead, for a brief overview, I'll direct you to the wiki page.

The land and structures left at the Bethlehem Steel Complex along the river are at the center of local controversy since it was sold in 2003 and then purchased by Sands Bethworks in 2007. Right now, construction is underway for a massive casino, another push in the direction to "culturally" and economically revive Bethlehem and the Leigh Valley. The casino is sought to bring millions in the Valley, to the South Side of Bethlehem. It is a complicated matter, as the part of the revenue from the casino is to go back into preserving the historical landmark and the story of the company. Save Our Steel is a comprehensive website dedicated to making sure the history of Bethlehem is preserved.

I was both unsurprised and saddened when I heard of the plans to demolish a large part of the complex along the Lehigh River. I've been following the story as it unfolds, in bits and pieces, through The Morning Call, absorbing the whole process from the distance of my kitchen table/computer screen.

I want to see a lot of things happen for a place with such a mighty history. I want to see those towering, massive buildings preserved. I want to see them used to teach not only the local history but the rise and fall of industry in the American economy. For people to try and understand the hard work, space and time that was required to fabricate steel for some of the tallest buildings in North America.

What I don't want to see put there is a casino. What I don't want to see put there is a glorified sports bar and 600,000 dollar condos. To me, that seems like a back-handed compliment to the people who not only worked there, but lived and died by Bethlehem Steel. In a way, I am glad that it is at least headed for preservation and the whole thing wasn't wiped away from the surface of the earth for the sake of a strip mall or Wal-Mart. But, a casino? Really?

So, I've been thinking about steel a lot, thinking about it in relation to the work that I've done in the past. While I know it's been heavily photographed and documented, I feel like a small project of about 8-10 photographs could be the thing that I need to start making work again. I've been thinking about it a lot, mulling over ideas and books, absorbing information and asking questions. I haven't had the time nor the money nor the energy to expend to continue with Coal Hunkie. I've been looking for something to jump start my thinking and making process again.

On top of that, I also purchased a Nikon D-40 as a means to continue making pictures. I'm not all that interested in making straight pictures with a digital camera (it's far too direct, I think) but I am interested in compiling large photos from a batch of single photos. I want to avoid a panoramic format, because that seems really obvious. I want something in between a super-long panoramic and a 4x5 photograph. In due time I plan on fabricating a large steel shadow box frame for one of the photos.

I will be visiting the National Museum of Industrial History across and just up the street from the original office building when I am in the Valley. I will also be browsing the Moravian Book Store for some much needed reading material.

In some ways, I feel like "It's been done". In one way, I'm just looking to make pictures again. In another way, I want to join the dialog that's been humming all over the Valley for the last 10 years.


A few more links, for the interested:

Bethlehem Online: Steel. Includes a map of the complex.

Steel Workers' Archives. The Steelworkers' Archives was formed in 2001 to ensure that the legacy of the Steelworkers is preserved. The photographs and brief words of the workers here is fantastic.

Forging America: A History of Bethlehem Steel. From The Morning Call.

Design Breakdown: Big Steel. Photographs.

The Sinking of Bethlehem Steel. An article from Fortune Magazine.

Anthracite Railroading Blog. Entries about Bethlehem Steel and my other favorite part of PA: The Coal Region.

"Home is at Once More Initimate & More Isolated Than Place."

Shikellamy State Park Overlook Panorama with the confluence on the West Branch (left) and North Branch (center) of the Susquehanna River, along with the boroughs of Northumberland and Sunbury, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, USA. Shikellamy State Park Marina unit on Packer Island also visible.

I was writing something recently and had to fact check the population of the town I grew up in. Wikipedia, much to my unsurprise, offered me Northumberland, Pennsylvania's very own Wiki. I knew most of the sparse information on the page but it was this photo that sort of left-hooked me to the brain.

"Home", the actual geographic location, has been shifting and moving since I left Northumberland when I was 13. Even now, "home" refers to different places, depending on my geographic location. "Home" when I’m physically in Medford, refers to my parents' house, in Allentown. "Home", when I’m in Allentown, could mean either Northumberland or Medford, depending on the context of the conversation and whom it's with. For example, when my father asks me "how long are you going home for and when are you leaving?" he means home as Northumberland. If my grandmother asks, "when are you going back home?” she means Allentown. If my mother asks me the same question, she means Medford.

It’s also interesting I’ve stopped calling here, where I am now, Boston and prefer to call it Medford, even though I’ve only lived in the apartment for a few weeks. Is that a sign of content-ness with location? That specific place, its title seemingly so important. I get fixated on place names and fall in love with them easily but that's another post for another day.

Deviations aside, I look at that photograph and I know, without even thinking about it, what it feels like to cross that bridge in the foreground, where it goes, and how it gets me to the places that are so familiar to me. I know that the sewage treatment plant is to the right, that underpass is too low for some trucks that come through town and what the French fries used to taste like at the Front Street Station. I remember unspecific moments that took place at unspecific times with such detail, I get overwhelmed by recalling smalls, the temperature of the air and the exact location of the scar on my best friend's face. School hallways, cracked sidewalks, quiet, dimly lit stores: all of it so prevalent in my head that it seems like it just happened yesterday.

Sometimes, if I’m a passenger (rare) in a car and my eyes are closed, the road will turn and bump a certain way that feels like driving up to 428 Nottingham Drive, on Strawbridge road and I will think I am headed back to that white sided bi-level on the hill. It is strange and unsurprising how deeply embedded the streets of Northumberland are in my head and body. That place is the back of my hand, the landscape of Home. It is familiar and very present in my memory and yet so removed from my everyday life, I am shocked to know, to discover that it's still home in it's place in my head.

Watching that photograph load was surreal. My brain clicked and recognized it immediately but experiencing it so removed from that place physically, on a public webpage that anyone can see, wasn't something I was prepared for. While it's a public place populated by 3,800 people, it always felt more private, a little darker, laced with bitterness and so linked to those formative years. To see it laid out in facts disconnected memory and emotion from home and let me see it, objectively, for the first time, for a mere second since I left. A small town, buried in the mountains of Pennsylvania, occupying 1.6 square miles.

Unremarkable but still Home.