steel here

artist statement​

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we were in town to visit a college. "it's up there," my father said as he pointed up the hill on our left, but i didn't turn away from the impressive array of ancient brown pipes and crumbling brick facades that stretched for miles outside the passenger window.

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it was stunning to see so much human effort left to rot. the casino and amazon warehouses that now occupy some of the mill neither disguise nor resuscitate the tombstone-like presence of its five blast furnaces and other medieval machinery. during the five years i spent living blocks away from the closed gates, i wondered how both the view and the mood would have differed if steel was still produced in the town.

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my interest in finding such scenes hasn't waned since i left bethlehem in 2017. the mon valley is one of the few remaining regions in the united states where steep hills scattered with row homes flatten out into cramped, century-old sites still dedicated to steelmaking.

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the search for these views that i first imagined over a decade ago was a long-awaited adventure. the mills in the background of these images have coexisted with the towns in the foreground for generations; it is both hopeful and rewarding to have explored places where the backdrop is more than a reminder of what once happened there.