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Houseboat on the Ohio River at Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Houseboat along Ohio River at Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Wrecked foundry in the abandoned Olive Stove Works, Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Interior of the abandoned Olive Stove Works, Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Interior of the shut-down Olive Stove Works, Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Olive Stove Works, Rochester, Pennsylvania; the company is now in the hands of receivers: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Auto graveyard seen through a window of the abandoned Olive Stove Works, Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Abandoned glass works in Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Interior of closed glass works in Rochester, Pennsylvania, now used for car storage: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Houseboat along Ohio River at Rochester, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
6 comments:
Ah, just up river from here, Tom, so many places like this ... and yet, now, even these monuments to a passing life are gone and the ones that remain are hardly ever preserved in the manner of Jack Delano, in fact they begin to slip from the collective memory more and more each day.
Perhaps this is the way of all things. How much has slipped from the collective memory of the species? Thanks for the Delano - fine, fine work.
Don,
Believe this: when putting this post together, the words flowed through the back of the mind: "just up the river from Don..."
So much is always slipping away in the river of time.
This set is from one of the uncatalogued "lots" hidden away deep in the LOC digital archives. There is something about coming upon a lost piece of the past, and being there, if only just for a moment.
Before the river flows on again...
Thanks, Tom - it is amazing what LOC has hidden away. So when you search the archives for something like this, you have to know pretty much that it exists?
Or do you go in generally, say for a particular photographer, and just troll, so to speak? Please, do not feel obligated to reveal trade secrets.
It's just my librarian's curiosity showing ...
Don,
The search process can be difficult unless you have a pretty clear sense of what you're looking for, and sometimes even then. But I've found that in the long run (I've been poking around in these files for some years now), curiosity and patience and perseverance are in most cases well rewarded.
Rewarded in pleasure and understanding, that is. For why else would we wish to go back there, but to explore and honour what was, on its own terms and for its own sake.
One of the problems with the archive is that searching a specific photographer -- say, John Vachon -- is a practical impossibility, because the catalogue for each individual photographer is so large that the browser (mine anyway) simply can't handle the file overload.
So you have to keyword your way in, through place and subject index.
As you go along, you find that only a fraction of the original prints and negatives have actually been digitized for viewing outside the Library.
But if you work with it, and put in the time and love, you find that what IS there is so abundant and mind-boggling, surprising doors keep opening out of dark corridors, and, bit by bit, whole worlds of small epiphanies of the past unfold.
(When I come away from a few nights of searching, the present always seems oddly pinched and dwarfed, and there is an overwhelming sense of all that has been lost.)
Coming in advancing age to an even deeper, less philosophic, and more literal sense of our own ending, "oddly pinched and dwarfed" seems to so well capture perceived reality (though my tortured syntax here may not help my point).
It's like that idea that time is experienced differently at different ages, how in childhood a month could seem to be a year and, in old age, the years go by like the old film cliché of calendar pages falling away.
It is why I've always so valued Proust; he seems, through all his neouroses and depravations, to be essentially so childlike as to continue to perceive the world in its unfiltered, fullest state.
I kind of suspected that the method you use is long and tedious - all that canceled, of course, by the joy of discovery you describe. As a librarian of the older school, though I appreciate digitazation for what it gives us, as a search method give me serendipity any day.
Ironic that, even in the library profession, we aren't able to catalog what we have correctly.
But, as you point out, the immensity of what exists overwhelms the task.
Thanks once again for all this long lost beauty.
And thank you, Don. I think we're in this together, somehow.
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