The photography of Almost Gone
by Richard Behrens
What Marc has captured in these photographs is a sense of inertness that is so violent that the photographs seem to be in continual motion even though nothing is moving. Rubble radiates everywhere, from the cracked concrete floors that are being compressed into mountain range-like heaps by the collapsing walls of the buildings, to the glass and metal fragments that are scattered about the roads and rail beds like debris from a colossal train wreck. The fragments of the steel works are still moving, falling to the ground via gravity, or scattering about through the slow agent of wind and decay. Many of the photographs tell their own stories of not only what a particular structure had been (be it a control shack at the base of a blast furnace or the vast cavern of a machine shop) but what has happened since it was abandoned. What distinguishes the ruins of Beth Steel from many other abandoned American factories is the relative absence of vandalism. The Steel has been privileged with some very good security over the ten years since its closing and many of the buildings and the rooms within are preserved exactly as they were the hours that the last crew clocked out on the last day perhaps with the exception of more fragmented rubble, more shattered glass, more dust, more decay. No teenaged gangs have sprayed painted the walls of the gas blowing engine complex, no thieves have pilfered the baskets of the welfare rooms, no Day-Glo obscenities shout from the contoured surfaces of the blast furnaces. When Marc and I visited the plant together in 2006, we found the same broken machinery lying on the floors that had been there when he first entered the plant in 2003. Beth Steel is decaying, but its decay is natural and elemental, not man made. The photos of Almost Gone are a static medium, but they explicitly show this effects of this decay over time. Marc has worked for many years with empty abandoned places, mostly industrial, and has photographed and painted them to the point where his trained and imaginative eye can see the ghosts of the past flickering through the empty structures. In Bethlehem Steel, what still haunts the ruins are the steel workers, the men and women who labored at the forgeries and the furnaces that burned 24 hours a day for over a hundred years producing the billions of tons of steel that built our nation's skylines and supplied our armed troops through several world wide conflicts. These ghosts are still there in the mind's eye, climbing the ladders and catwalks, pulling the levers that release the gates of flowing steel on the casting floors, showering in the welfare rooms and walking home in the twilight under the trestles in the glow of the blast furnaces. To walk in the ruins is to trespass in their very personal space, despite the vastness and large scale of the buildings and structures. When a corporation like Bethlehem Steel provides work and support for so many generations of families, there develops in the community a fierce pride and loyalty. Bethlehem, PA is one of those towns that lived and died by the Steel and Marc hopes that his photos and the film that we made together based on those photos, have captured that cultural legacy. These are more than decaying buildings, they are the honored past of a very proud town. Marc Reed and I hope that the photographs and the film Almost Gone do justice to their pride and sense of history. Richard Behrens |
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When I first saw Marc Reed's hauntingly beautiful photographs of the ruins of Bethlehem Steel, I was immediately struck by a very disorienting sense that was almost science fiction in its proportions. Here were these cyclopean structures, massive buildings and machines, that had been abandoned, laying inert like some deserted city after a deluge. Indeed, in its heyday, the steel works in Bethlehem, PA was large enough to qualify as a small city, and to gaze now at its impressive line-up of rusting blast furnaces and crumbling machine shops, is like looking at the skyline of some vanished civilization that had thrived on ancient technology.