Portraits in Steel

"It’s hard to be politically neutral. “Every aesthetic decision a photographer makes is simultaneously a social and political statement.” There you have it. Our conundrum. That’s from Mark Rice, his book Through the Lens of the City . I’ve shot a lot in Gary, Indiana, and Buffalo—in Buffalo it’s more deindustrialization, but in Gary and Detroit you’re really looking at racial injustice, landscapes of the urban poor. Even with the coaling towers, you could create a political conversation. Who exactly were the people doing the hard work behind the scenes that kept the railroads running? It’s damn hard trying to leave socio-political or socio-economic concerns out of the equation. My friend the historian John Hankey , who wrote one of the essays in Silent Monoliths , wants to address the human aspect of the coaling towers in his future writings to explore some of those issues. Who worked on them? What was it like? You can imagine it was mostly African American workers—four or five people doing brutally hard work, operating in coal bins in 90-degree weather and stifling humidity. I’m assuming the lower-end railroad work weren’t the safest or best-paid positions either. “It’s not that different from stumbling on an Inca ruin or Easter Island statues.” Compare that to the Bechers—their photographs are neutral. Their work is really formal, about formalism. Which maybe rescues them from any social concerns being suggested in their work. If you look at their books, there’s no big elaboration or art talk. They tell you what the blast furnace is, what it does. That’s it. Like Dragnet’s Joe Friday : they give you “just the facts.” I think they purposely wanted that neutrality. It was conceptual art. In regard to trying to achieve that neutrality, I’ve also been influenced by S.G. Ehrlich, who was an authority on 19th century evidentiary photography . In Erhlich’s view, the “something” that emanates from the photograph should be the physical reality of the evidence (the thing itself) and not the photographer’s skill in making the scene look more “compelling” or “dramatic.” As I said: “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” This was my intention as well, but it’s not always possible depending on how the work is “read.” Rogovin’s approach was deeply humanistic. He photographed these workers, then came back after everything had changed, after the steel plants closed and they lost their jobs. Some of them became friends. He was almost like Jimmy Carter—selfless. Where Chauncey Hare’s life was chaos, Rogovin had this stable, loving family life. I haven’t done the same kind of re-photographic project—not yet—but the coaling tower photographs do capture these structures at a specific moment in their decay and there is one spread in the book that shows the tower at Girard, Ohio, changing over a five-year period. Also in the book, if you look at the back end of the typology section, you can see nature overtaking the towers; if I return in five years, they’ll be completely obscured. Hankey mentions in his essay that if these things are still standing 100 years from now and somebody comes upon them, they might be encased in that foliage like a lost temple—a Dr. Livingstone moment. What is this? The train tracks might be gone. It’s not that different from stumbling on an Inca ruin or Easter Island statues."