"Footbridges to strip mills over Parkway East and Second Avenue" from "Steel Genesis" by Sandra Gould Ford
As you read this, the results of the midterm elections are final. You are either elated or dejected. A little of each, perhaps. The media is Wednesday-morning-quarterbacking, processing all the action for our pleasure as if they were post-gaming the Super Bowl. They are offering endless flourishes of purposeless second-hand commentary that will pass as legitimate news to many. The commentary itself is contributing to an ongoing feedback loop that’s reinforcing already entrenched positions, and you are left wondering if anyone in our society is still interested in first-hand information.
It might be a good time to unplug the television and revisit some primary source accounts of history; perhaps The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant or Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That. You might also start by visiting the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s Layton Gallery to view the current exhibition, “Steel Genesis.” A photographic elegy on Pittsburgh’s steel industry curated by LaToya Ruby Frazier, the show features several photographs by Frazier and dozens more by Sandra Gould Ford, as well as some captivating supplemental prose and poetry written by Ford herself.
While employed as an office worker at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, Ford regularly entered the production areas to take photographs. Surreptitiously it turns out, as photography wasn’t permitted at the plant. She continued to snap shots even after the mill closed permanently, and her photographic collection amounts to a 40-year narrative arc that traces the steel industry from its mighty climax, through its slow decline and, ultimately, into its afterlife. The story is a natural allegory for the recent history of rust belt America.
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The life of a steel mill is especially conducive to metaphor, it turns out, and Ford takes full advantage of the opportunity. Through both prose (in the form of wall text) and photography, she captures the soaring vitality of the J & L plant in the 1970s followed by its tragic collapse decades later. Ford takes us inside Greek’s diner, which lived impossibly in the shadows of the fiery blast furnaces, and its “thick” coffee, consumed among “oily fumes.” We see the ramshackle front door of the establishment in one photo and the bubbling coffee urn itself in another. We are there. So granular and real, you can almost smell the burnt air. We are also there 20 years later looking at plaintive farewell messages scrawled on the plant’s walls: “goodbye mice and rats,” and “Pension Please.”
As desperately sad as are the personal implications of this saga, the allegory of the plant as a living and generative organism is more powerful still. Ford’s description of the Open Hearth Furnace and ladles that “nursed that sloshing, volcanic brew toward the ingot molds” is visceral and organic. Her photograph of ingot molds sees them as a stack of cocoons or wombs, and her description of molten iron might as well be of blood.
Ford’s textual and photographic accounts of the Hot Metal Bridge spanning the Monongahela River and bringing pig iron to the steel mill characterizes it as an artery connecting the tissue of a complex organism—a beast so formidable that it took decades to finally die after being mortally wounded. Even while individual organs failed, blast furnaces shut down one by one, it slumped on under its own inertia for years before collapsing entirely.
Frazier’s photos and able curation function as a framework for Ford’s larger enterprise, offering aerial shots of the Pittsburgh sites where the steel plants once thrived as well as a wonderful portrait of Sandra Gould Ford herself. But it’s Ford’s work that ultimately forges the narrative.
Ford has continued to document the site of her former workplace long after its demise because she believes it has a story to tell; a story about resilience and regeneration. Industrial behemoths like Jones and Laughlin Steel and the labor behind it helped fashion the steel skeleton on which American post-industrial muscle hangs. Understanding the history and biology of that since-crippled organism can tell us a lot about our current social and cultural circumstances. But don’t take my word for it, take it from someone who was actually there, in the belly of the steely beast, thankfully with a camera in her hand.
