Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania

"Factory Valleys is one of my favorite books. I bought a copy in the late 80s or early 90s, and it created a thirst in me to see these landscapes. Friedlander photographed in Ohio and Pennsylvania—the deepest part of the Rust Belt. I remember one portrait of a worker where you don’t even see the man’s face—there’s a huge drill press between him and the camera—and he’s just standing there, working the press, arms raised. His torso and face have been rendered invisible by the machinery. You think about this human being doing that for eight hours a day. You think about the millions who’ve labored this way for years on end, and the exploitation they’ve experienced, perhaps without even realizing it. You have empathy. I’m a good liberal—I believe in unionism, power to the workers, all that. Friedlander’s portraits show that reality, that dignity in honest labor, not in an overt way, but subtly. But there’s a contrast here with other photographers. I should mention Chauncey Hare and his book Interior America from 1980. The art publisher Steidl recently published the complete body of that work as Protest Photographs —an apt title. Hare worked for the Chevron Oil Company as a mid-level manager and saw the exploitation and the dehumanization within the workplace. He became so disheartened by this he quit his job, and took his camera to Wheeling, West Virginia and Mingo Junction, Ohio—while also covering other significant areas of the Rust Belt. He used a wide-angle lens on a five-by-seven camera, and showed people in their working-class living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens, trying to capture that same sense of alienation, isolation and desperation which he felt in his own job, in his own life. It’s palpable in his photographs. You can feel it. Hare took his photographs because he was angry and wanted people to wake up to this alienation, to what he termed “the problem.” He was probably on the spectrum—not a social person, internalizing this alienation. But Milton Rogovin, who did Portraits in Steel —another industrial artifacts book we’re discussing today—was the opposite. He was an optometrist in Buffalo and a humanist with a camera. If somebody was poor and couldn’t afford eye care, he’d do it for free. He had a loving wife for 50 years. The portraits he took of workers don’t show them dehumanized—Rogovin’s photographs, if anything, celebrate them, their work and their dignity."