Like, Fall Town, this book is more archive, than book, particularly with so many shots. One day i’ll do a dynamite coffee table edit of under 200 images.
It’s the same introduction for all three books of the trilogy. First of all, the book, as seen here, is fat with pictures. An actual “coffee table book” would have one fourth of these shots for a tight edit, better flow and sense. But, with so many sites gone and capture in good old K 25, i went with a fuller documentation.
The country is so enamored with firsts, bests, especially by the world’s greatest, biggest Blowhard. Dirty Old Town is the America’s first Rust Belt book, whether it’s the best is up for grabs, not my concern and has nothing to do with my job. Begun in 1977, before the addiction to ruins and all things Rust Belt took place, when digital photography and the internet became a force around 9/11, Dirty Old Town has been in the darkness of my archive, where your originals are supposed to be, and, through a long process of digitzing, begun in 2006, i finally have the ability to show the work.
To be clear, in its day, the book was met with interest no doubt, but it seemed that, almost equally, it was met with a kind of scorn. This was because they hoped, like us all, that, what was happening was temporary, but also because to depict American cities in this manner – directly – was unsettling. This was the time of the South Bronx, and, up until then, all the old American cities just grew, and to see them now, as if they were European cities in 1945, was a new one and an uncomfortable one.
In this time industry was still the dominant economic force, and it was the industrial revolution that created the benefactors for these cities’ museums, universities, orchestras, etc., and these institutions were very leary of seeing what was to become the Rust Belt, and my expressed point, the the golden age of American cities was coming to a halt and it was not going to return.
But I was also shooting it, as if, National Geographic was sent it in. I was even using Kodachrome 25 film for a subject that was only shot with black and white with the exception of magazines and commercial industrial movies and stills. Kodachrome cries for light, (and I was there to dry its tears) and I took it to extremes just beyond its capabilities with great distances between brightness and darkness. And the other times it looked like the styles of 1960s industrial films made for corporations.
It was the first and only book of the trilogy of this industrial city, or any of my books, for that matter, that i hustled around for a publisher. Folks generally liked it, even a lot – the Smithsonian gave me a nice offer, but i was severley injured in a work accident and had many other fires burning, including a big functioning film career where i was trying to get my first features off the ground, and, while really important, and a big mistake in retrospect, i didn’t have the resources (underststement) to sustain it all, and i let the publication of Dirty Old Town slide into the archive, only to, in 2021, emerge on this site. Limited resources meant the foregoing of any printing or publication, let alone the required schmoozing, which would consume an amount of time that would cut my work capabilities by half, and eveything was disappearing, important things, so work took over and i paid for it all by my labor.
The same introduction is used for all three books of the trilogy, beginning in 1977. Dirty Old Town is the first volume of the trilogy of books that began with the birth of the Rust Belt and has never quit. Since the starting point was, the golden age of American cities is disappearing, never to return, and the general Blue Collar Holocuast, we turn to history and the facts to find out if this came to pass. It wasn’t necessary to change anything in the introductions, as everything assumed came true, over and over again and over thirty years. Not as prediction, but merely experience over time, which answers the question, “How did you know that?” whose answer is, “I live there.”
Rust Belt cities turn their corners at different times, and, although this city really never got there, until around 2009-2010, it began to finally head elsewhere, while isolating the extreme poverty in certain swaths of the city. The service economy did take over from manufacturing. It just took particularly long in many blue-collar cities, that are now divided between the professional and the working broke. The staggering population losses for industrial cities bottomed out now, left little of the large middle who left.
The trilogy of books, Dirty Old Town, Twilight Town, and Fall Town tracks a city’s descent until it could descend no more. Take a look at the book, then return, if you want to read more about the <a href=”https://realstill.com/the-intros-intro”>introduction to the original introduction</a> about America’s first Rust Belt book, begun before the moniker, Rust Belt. But go to the original book, below, and if you, then want to, come back and read more of the Intro’s Intro. Original book and introduction for DOT (1977-1988):
Introduction
“It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of it coming back.” Bill Vaughn
“This Town has as much charm as an automobile cemetery or the inside of a dynamo.” John Günter, INSIDE U.S.A., 1947
When I began to shoot pictures around 1978 the camera quite naturally became the ideal machine to capture the rapidly disappearing world of the American industrial city. Forty-two years ago an economic sea change was beginning as an impending manufacturing divestiture gained steam. It soon became clear that the era of industrial growth that generated the golden age of American cities was coming to a halt, not to return. Back in 1978 a long Industrial Age conclusion was taking shape and I had a camera, a will-to-represent the inevitable and maybe an intractable place on this subject of old and lost American cities.
Dirty Old Town (1978-1988) is a VIEW on one hell of a blue-collar city. A place (not Detroit) particularly emblematic of what has evolved into a decades long transformation in hundreds of towns and cities whose shape and fate was largely determined by the rise and fall of basic industry and manufacturing.
Regardless of economic changes up or down or during any time period, what used to be called the Industrial Heartland always had an endemic quality worthy of documentation. Since Rust Belt conditions kept returning (at least up until 2010) the regional qualities became more pronounced, especially in comparison to cities that ignored or jettisoned the old dominant manufacturing economy and prospered. Places like Dirty Old Town have been negatively endowed with a rareness, originality and character that a lot of the made over consumer driven cities just don’t have. The old deeply rooted, (if snaggletoothed) industrial cities have the highest rates of nativity (lack of in-migration? lack of resources to leave?) feeding a core sense of place. The photographic draw is the endemic city geography, its bare nativity – the home factor.
Dirtry Old Town (1978-1988) is a deliberate full frontal VIEW into the ebbing yet continued existence of a city whose roots were born in a revolution of industry 200 years ago. Dirty Old Town looks into a lot of this lost geography over a long time. “To the bitter end” you could say.
With no apologies, particularly during the time (1978-1998) when Rust Belt photography was not so appreciated, Dirty Old Town concentrates almost exclusively on the old sections of the city, which, essentially was and still is the city. Although antique, if not worn-looking and overgrown with ornamental flora, the old city is not dead and it functions even while wearing away. Shooting was structured around what seemed most immediately endangered. My priorities for each site were to show it 1.) operational, 2.) occupied, 3.) closed 4.) abandoned 5.) ruined. Shooting the closed, abandoned or ruined sites was done by default. Always compelled to provide any evidence of things made of this mostly anonymous but righteous toil – particularly if I wasn’t quick enough for the predictive moment, when the subject was there in full distinction.
Seventy years ago Walter Benjamin wrote, economic and technical developments…”can reduce the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them have crumbled.” The chosen locations, once bustling symbols of emerging modernity and opportunity in their time (and mine), may now appear archaic but still powerful in their persistence.
These former industry towns move on, perhaps a bit nostalgically confounded by becoming so different from their historic foundations, while still tied emotionally and physically to them. Forged in blue-collar ways, bound by the adversity of depopulation and poverty, they are now defined by a gnawing desire to revitalize themselves, a real inner-city demeanor and a profound sense of home. The hominess factor is particularly striking (in both occupation and dilapidation).
The work breaks down an industrial age city into its basics – factories, homes, churches, bars, machinery, bridges and shops. It’s is a catalogue of details, landscapes, and architecture of all sorts, imbued with a now faded illusion of permanence. The work will bear this out, as most places are gone or on the cusp. Not largely ruins, but mainly things near their end, but still alive. And, finally, the work is an inventory of sites meant to investigate and preserve a specific time, and metropolitan geography as if it were a guide to the Rust Belt and a map to an immediate past that seems gone even while persisting in our presence.
After all, who believes in industry anymore?
If Dirty Old Town illuminates the deindustrialized prelude to the technological age by recording the remnants of industrial expansion precisely at the time of their disappearance, then that’s good. The actual job was a bit more elemental. Like the city itself, my first goal was to stay alive, and then produce a document, with the best depiction I could conjure, of a city that was always in my lifetime, going, going, and never gone.
Memory is nothing if not an image. And history is theatre. A camera can be a memory machine, particularly if one’s intuition becomes fine-tuned enough to predict an object’s disappearance. I would try to aim the camera machine during moments that provided a soulful rendition. As the operator of my machine it was my decision to gather light and atmosphere without which there’s less to realize.
I’ve often asked myself, will any shot of an extinct thing have an intrinsic value? Would its value increase if it were made memorable?
And what about books of largely last things?
My thinking is that if I can make such a picture book it might have a life representing both what’s left and what’s not. It would be a FRAME on a place that was incredible and sublime both when it grew and prospered and when it fell and survived.
A period of stability beginning around 1995 almost tricked me into thinking I could finally end the declination saga, rid myself of a perceived responsibility. But classic recessions took hold in 2001 and 2008, with yet more plant closings, corporate headquarters flight, highest poverty rates, foreclosure on top of massive abandonment – the whole Rust Belt scenario piled on again. The city’s present mayor in December 2008 declared his primary objective is “to see that the city survives.”
As a Picture Man I’ve tried to keep the same city from disappearing. And in this particular sense it’s been a complete success.
The changes wrought by financial cycles in a mobile economy are quicker than ever. So sudden that many ask, even in our lives, “where have all those times gone?” One place they have gone is in my archive.
In this version of phantom city syndrome, maybe something important even vital is dismembered, but not forgotten at all. These towns still sustain, despite multiple injuries, that’s what these pictures reveal. Occupied and operational, abandoned and ruined before during and after its demise, the frame is wholesome, and it literally captures the Rust Belt dynamic in action. Accuracy and art not thought very much of as requisitely allied, important in Dirty Old Town.
This mix, done in a cycle of constant return over many years was not the opportunity that photos are supposed to be. An oblationally challenging tour of duty, Dirty Old Town continues to be motivated by the thought there might be some value in keeping a VIEW open to a noteworthy phase in our old industrial cities. Some are turning corners now, and becoming what they never could, others continue to fade, and there are many old and lost streets.
Put in another way, if the Mayans had cameras there’d be little debate about the rise and fall of their cities. (There would also be a record of their cities).
Speaking of – do cities die? I doubt it; at least it’s very rare. They do go through periodic sometimes-dramatic transformations. Over time, even while shrinking, some parts redevelop, other sections cannibalize themselves and much can disappear entirely, even to the point of being replaced by the nature it originally thwarted by its growth as a city.
Maybe the notion of a city as a completely settled or stable place has died. But within the city’s inexorable transformations something essential survives – the sense of place, if only as an image.