Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]From: <ECCity@aol.com> > You must wander around the old warehouses in what is left of the windy > streets and bridges along the Flats. . . On my first co-op job assignment as a freshman at Antioch College (near Dayton), I spent a windy, cold winter in Cleveland working in a chemistry lab in the Flats by day and photographing it by night in all its industrial glory. This was right around the time the Cuyahoga River caught fire, so I could almost pretend I was in a war zone, sneaking around steel mills and railway yards with my Ricoh Singlex in pre-Leica days. Some fond memories - Getting my film confiscated by guards at Jones and Luaghlin Steel; my Ricoh making odd crunching sounds at 6am atop a biting-cold, wind-swept bridge over the Flats, opening the camera and seeing little chunks of frozen film scatter in the breeze; for a better view of molten steel, mounting my tripod atop the coupler between box cars in a deserted ( I thought) train yard, when the crashing sounds of an engine hooking-on up the line overtook me as I crashed into the end of the box car, then jumping from a moving train with a camera and tripod strung around my neck. Now that was REALLY dumb! And of course, the still fond memory of somehow surviving my 19 year-old notion of immortality. On returning to a different kind of insanity at Antioch College in 1966, I did my first "co-op paper" as a slide program on the Flats, which I still have on old Ektachromes and Kodachromes that are in pretty good shape after all these years. Back then, I had no environmental agenda or thought of exposing anything other than film. The awesomeness of size and shape, the industrial fire, contrasting with snow that stayed fresh for a few minutes before taking on new patterns under a sooty film - all that was the beginning of trying to capture something really big on a small fragment of film. I'm still trying to do the same today, but Martin, do stay away from the trains. Regards, Gary Todoroff Tree LUGger