While in New York, I spent a great deal of time attempting to collect a few of my scattered thoughts on Bethlehem. Running on very little sleep (still) here is what I have, thus far. Subject to change, certainly to sleep.
(the spectral machine)
The machine stopped in the mid-nineties. The Golden Gate had been erected and jeweled with automobiles; the Empire State Building presided. In an age when a human being built a thing, an object, a monolith, and it was no longer a public spectacle of necessity or invention, of ribbon cutting or consequence, our infrastructure wavered. Marx collapsed into his books. We diffused into spectrality. Steel sat in the hands of China, and the Bethlehem Company fell, leaving a city of folded row houses in its wake. Along the Lehigh River, the blast furnaces rose and twisted like great animal trunks, betraying industrial time in silence. Hawks swept through empty rooms, the floors powdered with glittering soot. It was a slow death of production into antiquity.
"The center was not holding," wrote Joan Didion in 1967, her Bethlehem being a refuge to drag a weakened body. Had she dragged herself here, to Bethlehem, Didion would find little center at all.
When I first began to make photographs, I gravitated toward the unoccupied and the empty. The hollow. The "once was." Figuring as though the past would occupy my images in the inherent quality of empty walls or chipped banisters, I felt poetic. I photographed train stations, asylums, farm houses, junk yards. I named it spatial portraiture. The proverbial beautiful decay, though, like most, I could not make my attraction explicit. In reality, these were spaces of work, sweat, inversion, coercion, maybe death. Time, however, abstracted my subjects - through silencing, vandalism, a return to the "natural." In abstraction, I found the romantic. Instead of the iron bars is the ivy that filters sunlight, pouring from windows near a tower of stripped nails. Displaced is the meaning of the institution, the iron, the bars.
A photograph is a nominal fiction, selfishly constructed for the monopoly of a moment. Along the iron foundry, the bushes grow taller than the shingled roof, and the arches were built to invoke the arches of Rome. Here I found long plastic bags caught up in trees. Like gushing water, tendrils, anatomy.
Recently, the stacks have alighted with a new glow - not in the bellies of the machines or from bright lunar patterns. At night, Steel pulses red like the blushing twin sister of Emerald City. In the shadow of the new breed of giant, Steel quivers. They're saying the red will bring millions.
(the spectral machine)
The machine stopped in the mid-nineties. The Golden Gate had been erected and jeweled with automobiles; the Empire State Building presided. In an age when a human being built a thing, an object, a monolith, and it was no longer a public spectacle of necessity or invention, of ribbon cutting or consequence, our infrastructure wavered. Marx collapsed into his books. We diffused into spectrality. Steel sat in the hands of China, and the Bethlehem Company fell, leaving a city of folded row houses in its wake. Along the Lehigh River, the blast furnaces rose and twisted like great animal trunks, betraying industrial time in silence. Hawks swept through empty rooms, the floors powdered with glittering soot. It was a slow death of production into antiquity.
"The center was not holding," wrote Joan Didion in 1967, her Bethlehem being a refuge to drag a weakened body. Had she dragged herself here, to Bethlehem, Didion would find little center at all.
When I first began to make photographs, I gravitated toward the unoccupied and the empty. The hollow. The "once was." Figuring as though the past would occupy my images in the inherent quality of empty walls or chipped banisters, I felt poetic. I photographed train stations, asylums, farm houses, junk yards. I named it spatial portraiture. The proverbial beautiful decay, though, like most, I could not make my attraction explicit. In reality, these were spaces of work, sweat, inversion, coercion, maybe death. Time, however, abstracted my subjects - through silencing, vandalism, a return to the "natural." In abstraction, I found the romantic. Instead of the iron bars is the ivy that filters sunlight, pouring from windows near a tower of stripped nails. Displaced is the meaning of the institution, the iron, the bars.
A photograph is a nominal fiction, selfishly constructed for the monopoly of a moment. Along the iron foundry, the bushes grow taller than the shingled roof, and the arches were built to invoke the arches of Rome. Here I found long plastic bags caught up in trees. Like gushing water, tendrils, anatomy.
Recently, the stacks have alighted with a new glow - not in the bellies of the machines or from bright lunar patterns. At night, Steel pulses red like the blushing twin sister of Emerald City. In the shadow of the new breed of giant, Steel quivers. They're saying the red will bring millions.
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