Shorpy: Homestead Factory Town, 1910

Factory Town: 1910

Homestead, PA. Homestead Steel Works, Carnegie Steel Co., 1910.

The Memory Keeper

Yankee Magazine? Yankee Magazine! The Memory Keeper -- worth a read.

Joe Manning's Lewis Hine Project is an ongoing attempt to track the lives and descendants of hundreds of young mill workers photographed by Lewis Hine throughout Massachusetts as part of an early 20th century National Child Labor Committee investigation. Hine photographed kids at work in mills, mines, sweatshops, and farms around the country. As a snapshot of the history of work and exploitation, the photos are powerful; but what happened to these kids? Finding out how their stories played out is an incredibly compelling way to more deeply understand the history, meaning, and experience of work in people's lives.

Seems like this collection is ripe for such efforts around the country...anyone heard of other individuals, museums, or organizations attempting to track the lives and descendants of Hine's subjects?

From the article:

"These children returned to their spinning machines and their looms and went back to work. They grew up and lived their lives. Many of them likely forgot their brief encounters with Hine. Almost none of them ever saw their photographs or heard how they were used.

"For me, this is an enormous album of unfinished stories," Manning says, gesturing to his binder. Hine had taken only snapshots: two-dimensional renderings of a single moment in time. Manning needs more than that: "I look at one of these kids, and my reaction is: Whatever happened to this kid? Is that it? Is this all I know? Is this all I'll ever find out?" That's Manning's goal: He wants to find out what happened next."

Featured folks from the article:



Dana Smith for Yankee Magazine, 2011. Jenn Ford, great-granddaughter of Mamie Laberge, with her great-grandmother's photograph.



Lewis Hine, 1911. Library of Congress. Mamie La Barge at her machine. Under legal age. Location: Winchendon, Massachusetts.

Lewis Hine took many more pictures of Mamie Laberge and her family during his visit to Winchendon than are featured in the article. Check them out at the Library of Congress.

Trying Out

Is there any historic industry more dramatic, frightening, and fascinating than whaling?

No. Proof: Moby Dick. More proof: some amazing nighttime photos from the New Bedford Whaling Museum of "trying out." That's when, after taking a whale, the whaling ship becomes a fiery 24-hour factory dedicated to cutting it up and rendering the blubber. Allow Herman Melville to evoke the scene more elegantly, with my unnecessary emphasis added:

Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shriveled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur- freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

And now, some eerie photos of this incredible, seafaring factory work.

And one close-up:

The highest settlement in the world is a gold mining town

From photojournalist Mark Ovaska, by way of NPR, a remarkable series of photos from Rinconada, Peru. This is what a modern-day gold rush very, very high up in the Andes looks like. The vision of the industry's human and environmental impact is astounding...see the whole Glacier Gold series here.



From NPR: A miner makes his way up a steep trail during a shift change in La Rinconada, Peru. Revolving shifts allow miners to see daylight every few days. Copyright Mark Ovaska, 2010.



Alex Levine, Photographer-Genius

My fabulously talented brother Alex "Wix" Levine took this incredible photograph, a stunning visual representation of a spectrum of museum visitors.

Someone's ready for the cafeteria.

Grumpy Old People, Alex Levine. All rights reserved.

Industrial Light & Magic: 1915

Shorpy does it again!

More Sloss

WOW. More good stuff from Shorpy.

Sloss City Furnaces, 1906.

Reposted -- "Big Tipper: 1910"

Very cool image from Shorpy today: http://www.shorpy.com/node/9682?size=_original

"Toledo, Ohio, circa 1910. "Brown hoist, Ohio Central coal dock." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company."

Devastation from Above

Check it out: striking, gorgeous, horrifying aerial photographs from J. Henry Fair documenting contemporary industrial impact on the landscape. I could see these as a temporary exhibit in just about any good industrial history museum, looking at the ongoing environmental effects of industrialization in a unique way.

Worth looking through the whole set: Devastation from Above

UPDATE: The New York Times has more today. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/arts/design/14earth.html

Bauxite Waste, J. Henry Fair.

Women @ Work

More amazing color photos from the Library of Congress. From the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection, photographs of women at work in war industries during WWII.

First of all, Mrs. Eloise Ellis here is awesome.

Mrs. Eloise J. Ellis has been appointed by civil service to be senior supervisor in the Assembly and Repairs Department at the Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas. She buoys up feminine morale in her department by arranging suitable living conditions for out-of-state employees and by helping them with their personal problems. Library of Congress.

Second, these photos are fascinating from both an aesthetic, historical, and sociological point of view. There's a strong sense of novelty here in the way that photographers depicted female factory workers. An admiring but distinctly ironic tone pervades the captions. The significant historical moment and the still-powerful visual novelty of seeing women in an industrial environment remains appealing; I, for one, am blown away by the above photo. But the collection is (fascinatingly) problematic. These are women, the viewer is constantly reminded, and their role as heavy industrial workers is a temporary, novel, even unnatural -- albeit patriotic -- state of affairs.

It's also about sex. These photos represent real-life "Rosie the Riveters." This vision of "Rosie the Riveter" on the left below (I know this isn't technically her) has become more iconic than Norman Rockwell's original "Rosie" character on the right. Both depict women transgressing gender norms -- work shirts, muscles, self-assured gazes -- but Rosie on the left retains the trappings of femininity. To rephrase it, she's the (conventionally) hot one. Shiny hair, shiny nails, shiny lips, strong without looking like Popeye. Left-side Rosie's power comes as much from her "traditionally" feminine, sexy physical presense as from her flexed muscle and determined look; Right-side's comes from her rivet gun, massive forearms, and meaty sandwich. Both play on a sense of novelty, even irony, but Rockwell's portrait remains more comfortable with the tough, transgressive realities of women in wartime production.

Here's a selection of some more photos in the collection that represent an amazing spectrum of visions, constructions, and realities of femininity. How do their subjects' appearance and interaction with their environments affect your perceptions?

[WHOA]

Lastly, the caption on this next one captures the enduring sense of novelty surrounding women factory workers in heavy industry: Girl inspector confers with a worker as she makes a a careful check of center wings for C-47 transport planes, Douglas Aircraft Company, Long Beach, Calif.

Plus, check out that body language.

Views of Lawrence

Spent an awesome afternoon in Lawrence, Mass. yesterday. Lawrence is one of the most dramatic post-industrial landscapes I have ever seen, and home to the amazing Lawrence History Center. 100 years ago, Lawrence was the wool textile capital of the world and home to thousands of immigrant families trying to grab an incredibly elusive, often cruel piece of the (not-yet-coined) "American Dream" in the city's cavernous mills.

The mills -- which formed the basis for the city's entire economy -- began shutting down mid-century. Families continued coming from all around the world, particularly from Latin America in the past half-century, putting down new roots and making a life in this old city.

Today, Lawrence is still struggling tremendously with the economically devastating loss of its manufacturing sector. At the same time, there is incredible resiliance, community energy, and life among the often empty (and insanely dramatic) old brick factories. Every time I visit, I'm totally inspired by the History Center. Archive, community center, museum, gathering place, anchor -- this is one tiny non-profit with a big and growing reach in Lawrence. In a city that has seen more than its share of community division and economic dislocation, the Lawrence History Center uses history as a tool to connect people across languages, cultures, and experiences. I urge you to check them out.

Now, some pictures of old industrial stuff:

Why I love the LOC

From the always-incredible Library of Congress... The Prokudin-Gorskii Collection.

This photo was taken in 1909:

The Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection features color photographic surveys of the vast Russian Empire made between ca. 1905 and 1915.