Industrial Remains
Ariba Corporate Headquarters
Sunnyvale, California
May-June 2003
Solo Show
The Hub Gallery
December 2003-January 2004
Oakland, California
Solo Show
In the heyday of heavy industry, the smoke and grime that factories, plants, mills and shipyards brought with them were considered signs of prosperity. Of people hard at work. Of communities flourishing. Of shifting bases of economic power. In 1919, Charles Fitzhugh Talman—an unapologetic futurist, among other things—even went so far as to compare the humanistic acheivement of America's steel plants to the building of St. Peter's Basilica and the Taj Mahal. Time, with all its sobering perspective, has read things differently.
That said, the enduring legacy of heavy industry remains complex, and is rendered in a dizzying spectrum of grays between the ethical absolutes of black and white. The question I pesonally keep coming back to is, "what's left when the work dries up?" Certain products, manufacturing processes and geographical centers have been naturally selected out of existence (or at least relevance) by a kind of geopolitical Darwinism. In some cases, the factory towns that grew up around them have disappeared, too. In others, they've been doomed to wander the post-industrial desert in search of a new way of life.
While photographing a defunct lumber mill on the northern California coast, I came upon a poignant reminder of the intrinsic relationship between industry and its industrial communities: scrawled in white chalk on the side of a rusting furnace wall were the words, "Goodbye powerhouse. I'll miss you." Later, in the town, the proprietor of a local drinking establishment explained that on the day the mill closed, hundreds of employees wrote personal messages to the mill in locations known only to them.
Today, around the mill site, official words like "remediation" and "redevelopment" have replaced the old words of affection and respect. A stretch of decimated coastline will be meticulously refashioned into something resembling a native landscape. Restaurants will be erected where lumber once was treated with chromated copper arsenate. And the lumber we Californians need to build suburbs to accommodate our state's ever-swelling population will come from a different mill, a different town, perhaps a different country.