From Milltown to Malltown: Poems by Jim Daniels and Jane McCafferty, Photography by Charlee Brodsky

Find the steel mill in this picture
or not . . .
(From “Find The Steel Mill In This Picture” by Jim Daniels)

The steel mills disappeared practically overnight – at least that’s how it seemed to me. They’d flanked the rivers in and around Pittsburgh for a hundred years, deeply rooted in the urban landscape when I first moved to Pittsburgh in 1976, still thriving in 1978 when I moved away to the west coast. But, when I returned to Pittsburgh in 1985 with my husband (a “Yinzer” by birthright), those mills were coming down. We got back just in time to photograph the final days of US Steel’s Homestead Works and its subsequent demolition.

The former Homestead mill site, which has been turned into a suburban mega complex known as The Waterfront, is the subject of From Milltown to Malltown (Marick Press, 2010), a book of photography and poems by photographer Charlee Brodsky and poets Jim Daniels and Jane McCafferty (all three on faculty at Carnegie Mellon University). Each of the thirty-six black-and-white photographs by Brodsky is paired with a companion poem by Daniels or McCafferty which was written in response to the images. Jane McCafferty describes the process of this collaboration in an interview which you can read here.

All that remains of the old mill at the Waterfront are a dozen towering brick smokestacks, dramatically illuminated by spotlights at night. Vast parking lots and traffic feeder lanes surround a sprawling shopping center, restaurants, cinema, office complex, hotel, townhouses and apartments. Up the hill a few blocks beyond the new commercial site, what is left of Homestead’s old downtown business district struggles to survive amid empty storefronts. Just upriver across the Monongahela stands Carrie Furnace, her rusting blast furnaces visible from the outermost parking lots at the Waterfront, a ghostly relic and possible future monument to Pittsburgh’s steel-making history.

The Waterfront Mall complex in Homestead is not the only Pittsburgh area mill site turned into a shopping district. SouthSide Works, which is more urban in design and layout, is built on the former south side site of J&L Steel, which operated mills on both sides of the Monongahela River that were connected by the Hot Metal Bridge.

Today, it amazes me now how close in proximity these mills were to downtown Pittsburgh, their smokestacks practically part of the city skyline. Back then, it seemed as though they’d always stood there, belonged there. The first time I saw them was as a child, from the backseat of my parents’ car when driving past on our way to Ohio. They made a lasting impression. It’s their fire I remember most – flames shooting high into the sky. But the mills were never part of my heritage in the way that they are for generations of Pittsburghers. I didn’t grow up with them looming in my future as Pittsburgh children did. Those mills were ingrained in their identity, and now they live with the mill ghosts. When they walk on the streets of SouthSide Works or drive through the Waterfront, they feel the absence, sense the void “in the land of Used-Ta-Be.”

This picture is so silent, not even dogs
can hear it. Not even the wind
has a point of view.
(from “Fresh Fish” by Jim Daniels)

Thanksgiving Sneaking Up?

Hey, I’m home.

Push yourself away from your desk and let me in.

Helloooo.

Come on. Seriously.

Stop staring and let me in.

What's
so
funny?

???!!!

Thanksgiving is sneaking up from behind, in the same way that these wild turkeys caught my cat, Nebby, by surprise in our back yard. Lots to be thankful for, indeed, and this front page news in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette made me extremely happy (and thankful to be living in such a vibrant literary city). Congratulations to Pittsburgh poet Terrance Hayes on winning the National Book Award in poetry last week for Lighthead (Penguin, 2010). You can read a short interview with Hayes by Jean Hartig here. And, you can see and hear Hayes read one of his poems at the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s 4th Annual jazz poetry concert at Sampsonia Way and read an excerpt of an interview with him by poet Lynn Emanuel here.

City of Asylum: Sampsonia Way on Christmas Day

Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA

Christmas at our house is celebrated without all the craziness. We don’t get caught up in all the shopping frenzy (we stopped trying to buy each other the perfect gift years ago) and instead celebrate in quiet ways. We put up a real tree and decorate the house (usually just the inside, although some years we put up outdoor lights). On Christmas Day, we build a fire in the fireplace and make a few phone calls to family members scattered across the country.

The past few years we’ve gone on a Christmas walk, usually along one of Pittsburgh’s urban river trails. Last year we walked along the Allegheny River near Western Penitentiary, where holiday visitors were coming and going from the parking lot behind the razor wire fences. It was a cold afternoon, and the bitter breeze along the riverfront made my eyes water as we stopped to feed bread to the ducks and geese that followed us along the trail.

On our way home, we drove through the Mexican War Streets District on the North Side to take a look at Sampsonia Way. The afternoon sunlight was gorgeous and beckoned us to photograph as we walked its short length. The Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum, is located on Sampsonia, and the local creative forces were well organized when the Google Maps Car came to town to film Pittsburgh for their Street View maps. To see the unusual happenings, take a look at the street on Google maps or visit YouTube to see the making of “Street with a View.”

Poet's House

Sampsonia Way is home to the Poet’s House, which was the residence of exiled Chinese poet Huang Xiang after City of Asylum/Pittsburgh offered him housing there in 2004. Huang Xiang, who has been living in the United States since 1997, had been imprisoned in China for 12 years for writing about human rights. He painted his “House Poem” in Chinese calligraphy on the brown clapboard exterior of the building.

Susan Hutton (in her 2006 article “Writing on the Wall” on the Poetry Foundation’s website) describes Huang Xiang’s situation:

"He was first arrested in 1959 for leaving one province without official permission and seeking employment in another. For this he was sentenced to four years in laogai, a reform camp similar to the Russian gulag. In 1965 he was arrested for engaging in counterrevolutionary activities—primarily writing, reading, and discussing issues related to human rights—and was sentenced to three years of hard labor in laogai and forbidden to read or write. By the time he was 25, he’d served more than seven years in laogai. His writings were banned in China for 40 years.

Though he avoided prison for the next decade, he was officially forbidden to write. He continued to do so anyway, secretly; his rooms were regularly searched, and any discovered writing was confiscated. Out of necessity, he made it a habit to commit his poems to memory, sometimes reciting them privately for a small circle of friends."

Sampsonia Way has been in the press recently: first George Packer’s blog post at The New Yorker earlier this month and then last week a piece by Diana Nelson Jones in her City Walkabout blog at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Online.

Having time to write is the best gift I receive at Christmas when I’m on “winter recess” from my university job from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day. One of my favorite parts of the holidays is taking my laptop computer into the living room where I can write by the fire and enjoy the Christmas tree lights and decorations. This is a gift I’m always grateful for – time to slow down and quiet my mind, to shake off the day-to-day noise and rush of the working world, to tap into the creative zone. That and the freedom to write whatever I choose, which is something I don’t ever take for granted.

Happy Holidays!

Photo Credits:
"Sampsonia Way" photograph, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams.
"Poet's House" photogarph, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams.
"Amaryllis" photograph, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams.

Cold Comfort: Maggie Anderson's poems on the photography of Walker Evans

I keep coming back to the photographs of Walker Evans: Appalachia and the South, farms and farmers, steel mills, graveyards, signs, churches, small towns and main streets, living rooms and porches, New York City street scenes and subway riders. These are the same iconic subjects recurrent in my own writing. Well, not the New York City subway and street scenes. Except for a long ago train trip from Chicago to Boston that involved changing trains there, New York City is outside my experience. All I really know of it is what I’ve seen in photographs and movies and books.

In last week’s post, I mentioned Philip Gefter’s essay “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” which explores the truthfulness of photographs. I’ve never questioned the truthfulness of Evans’ photographs or that they are purely documentary. In fact, a common criticism of Evans’ work is that it’s too clinical. However, in reading James R. Mellow’s biography Walker Evans, I came across some information about Evans’ approach to his subjects that made me uncomfortable. Walker Evans sometimes went to elaborate lengths to conceal his photographic intent.

For his New York City subway series, Evans used a concealed camera strapped on under his overcoat with the lens poking out between the front buttons and a cable release threaded down the sleeve to trip the shutter. He was also fond of using an angled viewfinder which enabled him to photograph someone who was standing on the periphery. While it appeared to onlookers that Evans was photographing something in front of him, he was actually shooting in a different direction off to the side. To further his ruse, he often had a companion pretend to pose in front of the camera for the picture he wasn’t taking. I’m not quite sure why this bothers me since it ostensibly allowed him to document what was happening without altering or interfering with the scene – which is the key element of true documentary photography. As Gefter wrote, “As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed.”

I’m beginning to question whether Evans’ camera actually did alter the scene. It’s the eyes of his subjects that unsettle me – their curiosity, the questioning stares. Were these people standing on the sidelines? Were they caught up in watching him at work, not realizing they were his subjects? Did the presence of the camera attract their attention, creating an odd twist to the observer vs. the observed?

In the summer of 1935, Evans spent several months photographing in West Virginia and Pennsylvania when he was one of the photographers working on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project under Roy Stryker. Poet Maggie Anderson’s family was from Rowlesburg, WV, which is one of the towns Evans photographed. Anderson wrote a series of poems about Walker Evans and his West Virginia photographs, included in her 1986 poetry collection, Cold Comfort, which was published fifty years after Evans’ photographs.

Maggie Anderson was born in New York City where her parents worked as teachers, and every summer they traveled to West Virginia – home. In a wonderful interview with Kate Long for the radio series “In Their Own Country,” Anderson described these trips to West Virginia and how she felt freer in Rowlesburg where there were more outdoor places for a child to play than in New York City, and where she was surrounded by cousins and extended family. In response to a question in Kate Long’s interview about whether she “has it in for Walker Evans,” Anderson said, “I guess I sort of do have it in for him” but later goes on to say “he’s a wonderful photographer.” Maggie explained that there was something about Evans’ stance that made her feel protective of the people he photographed, and that Evans “couldn’t know them the way I did.” She emphasized that she wasn’t saying he didn’t have a right to make the photographs – just that he couldn’t possibly see or know those people as she does.

When asked if she’d like to look at and discuss some photographs for this blog article, Maggie respectfully declined, saying she preferred to let the poems speak for themselves and that she feels she’s said all she has to say about Evans’ photographs. I can certainly understand wanting to let the work speak for itself. They are strong and beautiful poems, the language as visual as any photograph, so that readers form their own idea of how the photograph looks.

My own feelings are somewhat mixed since I’ve stood on both sides of the camera, and for all I know I’ve been captured standing off to the side unaware as well. I understand a photographer wanting to document what he or she sees, and there could be an argument made that the angled viewfinder allowed Evans to make a purely documentary image. I see nothing wrong with shooting from the hip in a public place. It’s the elaborate subterfuge Evans employed that bothers me, and I’m not sure that the resulting images weren’t influenced by the presence of the camera in a different way. In some cases it may be that the intent and curious expressions on the faces of his subjects are because they are watching the photographer with interest, thinking they are watching him take a photograph of someone or something else.

If the people and places Evans had photographed were of my own family and home, I would feel protective of them too. But, there’s just enough distance for me to appreciate Evans’ photographs because they are of another place, of other people – even though those people are very much like the people and place where I come from. Distance equals comfort. And Evans pierced the comfort zone of the people in the West Virginia towns of Rowlesburg, Terra Alta, Morgantown, and Reedsville.

For me, it’s an interesting juxtaposition of work by two artists I admire. Walker Evans’ photographs show the outer experience, a limitation of the photographic art form by its nature. Maggie Anderson’s poetry peels back the exterior to reveal the emotional interior of personal territory in a way that language does best. While I still regard Evans’ photographs with great admiration, Anderson’s poetry alters the distance with which I now view them.

Photo Credits:

Top: “Main Street, Morgantown, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34376.

Bottom: “Independence Day, Terra Alta, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF3301-009002-M1.