<span class="text"><font color="#333333" class="text"> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br type="_moz" /> </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <p><strong>The Calumet Region Photographs: Requim for A Heavyweight</strong></p> </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">John Ruff</span></span></p> <p> <meta content="" name="Title"> <meta content="" name="Keywords"> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"> <link href="file://localhost/Users/garycialdella/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List" /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>3055</o:Words> <o:Characters>17419</o:Characters> <o:Company>Carr Cialdella Photography</o:Company> <o:Lines>145</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>34</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>21391</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>11.1282</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG /> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotShowRevisions /> <w:DoNotPrintRevisions /> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin /> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> </span></span><style type="text/css"></style><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--StartFragment--> </span></span></meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal"> <meta content="" name="Title"> <meta content="" name="Keywords"> <meta content="text/html; 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color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">I have lived in Northwest Indiana, in the Porter County town of Valparaiso, since I accepted a position teaching English at Valparaiso University in 1989. The county seat, Valparaiso was historically a town where management from the steel mills on the south shore of Lake Michigan chose to live and raise their families. Now the mills are mostly shut down, and Valparaiso University has become one of the larger employers in this area, if it is not in fact the largest. I live in a modest one-story home in an old neighborhood called Forest Park, aptly named for the abundance of red and white oaks, shagbark hickories, and maple, tulip, and black walnut trees that still thrive here, probably because the Valparaiso Moraine left the landscape too rumpled with ravines to make it good farmland. Everywhere else in Indiana that Hoosier farmers wanted to plow, they plowed.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="line-height: 150%; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /> <span class="text"> The south shore of Lake Michigan lies twelve miles straight north out my study window. To the west down that shore are Burns Harbor, Gary, East Chicago, and Whiting--the rusting remains of Indiana steel country, once one of the most powerful manufacturing centers in the world. At intervals along the shore, between mills and power plants, hemmed in between Lake Michigan and a major transportation corridor into which four interstate highways funnel, lie segments of the National Lakeshore and Indiana Dunes State Park. These preserves protect a complex, ever-shifting, extremely diverse ecosystem, fragile even without the effects of massive industrialization in a burgeoning population center. Thanks to the efforts of Chicago-area nature lovers who fought to preserve it, what remains of this set of dunes and wetlands, the very place where the study of plant succession and modern ecology was born, is a remarkable treasure. I have to confess, having come from Minnesota, having lived in Rome, Italy, then southern Oregon, and then Seattle, Washington, that I was not prepared to find Northwest Indiana such a starkly beautiful place.</span><br /> <span class="text"> The Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University has an impressive collection of paintings by Chicago-area painter Frank V. Dudley, who more than any other artist taught the rest of us how to see and appreciate the stunning natural beauty of the Dunes. It is an open question how much of the lakeshore would have survived unspoiled without him. At Valparaiso University, I often teach an American studies course on American literature and landscape, in which we consider the literary and artistic development of the United States river system by river system, usually beginning with the Hudson River Valley, to which so many important cultural origins can be traced. My purpose is to explore how these texts, verbally and visually, lay bare our attitudes, beliefs, and ambivalences about the land, how we possess it, and how it possesses us. Lately I have been trying to do more with the local story, and Dudley helps. The preservation of the Dunes is important, with wide-reaching implications for our nation and for these times. Can our economy rebound? Can our human and natural resources be sustained? As I ponder these issues, I am excited about exploring the landscape that Gary Cialdella is teaching me to see in his Calumet Regions series of photographs. It is not like any other landscape I know, and Cialdella's eye for its stunning truths and beauties is acute.</span><br /> <span class="text"> I first became aware of Cialdella's work when the Brauer Museum hosted a small exhibit of his Calumet Series photos a couple of years ago. I had long been a fan of Charles Scheeler's great photographs and paintings of the Ford Plant at River Rouge, Michigan. No one before Scheeler had captured better the heroic sublimity of that first great cathedral of American industrial power. Scheeler struck me as a later, quieter, visual version of Walt Whitman, celebrating the muscle, the know-how, and the energy of American industry. Cialdella is also drawn to such heroic images, and they are abundant in his series. My preference is for landscapes dominated by power pylons, oil refinery tanks, and bridges. Cialdella has a great eye, and makes great operatic visual poetry of this region's "body electric." If I had to pick a favorite, though, it would probably be his image titled "Grand Calumet River, East Chicago, Indiana, 2002," which is quieter, more static and contemplative. What moves me in this image is the way the eye is led up past the rush-filled banks of the quiet river into a field of refinery tanks and power pylons. More than most of the images in the series that put the manmade and the natural worlds in dialogue, here we observe a rare sense of harmony and balance, perhaps the effect of Cialdella's having put the tanks midway up the picture plane at eye level, so that they are less imposing than usual, barely rising above the tall grasses in front of them. The image is largely water and sky, in almost equal proportions, the water clear and placid under a sky much less leaden than usual--a sunset, in fact, such as would attract the camera of a photographer much more interested in the conventionally beautiful than Cialdella seems to be. But beautiful it is, and thematically nuanced and rich, this quiet icon for the Region, for its river, and for its resources.</span><br /> <span class="text"> But as Gregg Hertzlieb points out, it is the uncanny proximity of the residential and the industrial in the working-class neighborhoods of the Calumet Region for which Cialdella has an unfailing eye, as well as the way the manmade industrial landscape interacts with, and often dwarfs, what stands against it representing the natural and sometimes spiritual world. From that first show I saw of Cialdella's work, the image that most knocked me out was of a fenced backyard full of lawn ornaments--deer, ducks, bunnies, a birdbath, little people fishing, a couple in a swing, all gathered around a carefully constructed pool ("Backyard, Reese Street, Robertsdale Neighborhood, Hammond, Indiana, 1999"). The more I study the image, the more uncanny it becomes--like a nature preserve but with artificial animals and artificial people, a tableau vivant of unnatural natural harmony, but with no way in and no way out. It appears to me that this rectangular island of artifice extends well beyond where I imagine the lot line should be, and nowhere is there evidence of a gate. There is a patio with patio furniture, sans cushions. So who ever sits there, to view and be viewed in this setting? Ultimately it is the carefully tended chain link fence that dominates my attention, how it both protects and imprisons, how it both admits my gaze and blocks it, as vinyl lattice strips woven in a diagonal pattern through the back fence partially obstruct my view of the alley.</span><br /> <span class="text"> I love how Cialdella takes us into the backyards and down the alleys of the working-class neighborhoods of the Calumet Region, into carefully tended private outdoor spaces that both expose and conceal the owners, like his images of the people themselves, like the images of their house fronts, straight-on shots that in the same instant can be so revealing and yet so opaque. Cialdella doesn't pry with his camera, but he doesn't flinch, either. This is particularly true in his rendering of more public civic and commercial landscapes of the Region. Whereas Scheeler's art shows us American industrial might. Cialdella documents its decline and ruin. He shows us the junk, the refuse, the rust. He takes us to the entrance of a junkyard; he shows us boarded-up storefronts, vacant lots, abandoned factories. When I think of Scheeler and Cialdella together, I think of Thomas Cole's famous series of paintings The Course of Empire. In that series of five paintings, as if anticipating time-lapse photography, Cole renders the same locale as he imagines it being transformed, socially, economically, politically, even geologically, through time. It is a tragic vision of human history that culminates in the kinds of picturesque ruins that Cole's generation of American painters had to go to Europe to paint. Cialdella, at a different point in the course of American Empire than Cole and Scheeler, has ample opportunity to render American ruins in Gary, East Chicago, and Whiting, and he captures them with great realism and pathos.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Gregg Hertzlieb claims that Gary Cialdella's photographs of the Calumet Region bring him home. That both is and is not the case for me. I grew up far from the Region, on the corner of Dowling Avenue and York Avenue in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, a northern suburb of Minneapolis. Our two-story home, bigger than many in Cialdella's book (but barely big enough for what eventually became the ten of us), faced a tree-lined greenway, Victory Memorial Drive, which physically insulated us from North Minneapolis while connecting us to a wonderful parkway system linking Minneapolis and its beautiful chain of lakes from north to south. Depending on the season, neighborhood kids played pickup games of baseball or football on the drive whenever enough of us could gather, which was often. There were lots of kids to play with--this was in the sixties and early seventies--and no adults were involved. This was long before children lost their right of assembly for unorganized spectatorless sport.</span><br /> <span class="text"> No refineries or mills or railroad trestles interrupted the view out my bedroom window across the drive. Only the bell tower of St. Austin's Catholic Church on the corner of Vincent and Dowling rose higher than the roofs and treetops. But I do connect to these Calumet Region photos, in a number of ways. First, there is a family connection, through my mother, whose father and brother and two nephews spent their entire careers working for Williams Steel and Hardware in North Minneapolis--my grandfather as the company's best salesman for forty years, my uncle and his eldest son as salesmen who each rose up through the corporate ranks to become president of the company.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Williams Steel has been an institution in North Minneapolis for almost 150 years. In the 1860s, Joshua Williams ran a hardware store on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis that served local builders and blacksmiths. That store evolved into Williams Steel and Hardware, an iron, steel, and hardware wholesaler serving the Upper Midwest from its landmark warehouse off Lowry Avenue on the east bank of the Mississippi River. My cousin Thomas Young, the current president of Williams, has spent his whole term in office, since 1999, presiding over the downsizing of the company that his father and his grandfather helped to build--the company whose decline both saw coming but neither could do anything to prevent.</span><br /> <span class="text"> It was in sixth grade that I first began to learn about the role that steel played not just in my family but in my state's history. In geography class at St. Austin's Catholic School, we learned that the richest deposit of iron ore in the entire world came from our state. I once thought, hoped, believed, that the words "Mesabi Range" spread across the northern part of the map of Minnesota in rippled italic letters referred to mountains, and in a sense they did--but mountains of iron ore, buried underground, which long before I was born were being torn out of the earth, loaded onto ore boats, and shipped across Lake Superior and Lake Michigan to ports in Illinois and Indiana, near mills whose satanic furnaces burned day and night to turn it into steel to gird the nation and win its wars. Victory Memorial Drive, with its stately elms and the memorial markers we used for bases or sidelines, was designed as a tribute to Minnesota's war dead, but it was also a memorial to the victory of American steel, of American manufacturing and agriculture in the making of the postwar world.</span><br /> <span class="text"> I was still a teenager when they developed the process for turning low-grade iron ore into taconite pellets, which I now know marked the beginning of the end of a long, proud tradition of iron mining in Minnesota. My father, an advertising executive in the late 1970s, managed his company's account with 3M Corporation (the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company), one of Minnesota's strongest, oldest Fortune 500 companies, for my era much better known as the inventor and manufacturer of Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes than for mining. The sad fact is, my whole life, the northern part of Minnesota has been economically depressed, and the American steel industry has been headed into decline--not unrelated facts by any means.</span><br /> <span class="text"> So I connect emotionally with Gary Cialdella's eloquent elegy to the Calumet Region and all it once stood for, as a fellow Midwesterner with family ties to a proud tradition of American manufacturing and to the American steel industry. And the photographs do bring me home, by helping me remember where I came from and what privileges I enjoyed, by helping me see my surroundings as both like and unlike the setting where Gary Cialdella and Gregg Hertzlieb came of age. I think about the house on the corner that I grew up in, with the shapely Colorado blue spruce out front and the greenway across the street, when I look at Cialdella's amazing image of another two-story house on a corner, with three bare trees out front, slender, shapely, and spectral against a background dominated by huge oil tanks beyond a chain link fence ("House and Oil Storage Tanks, Hammond, Indiana, 1989"). I am struck by the scale of things, the understated assertion of a natural world by the bare trees, versus the muscular, abstract dominance of the manmade industrial world. I see empty trees versus capacious tanks, and between them a two-story brick house, absolutely unornamented. Unlike most of the homes in the series, this one was shot in profile, most likely to capture the juxtaposition I have been talking about, thus situating this human dwelling smack in the middle of these contending worlds, the natural versus the industrial. The image is so starkly beautiful, so tonally evocative, the forms so full. Has anyone made more visual poetry of refinery tanks than Gary Cialdella?</span><br /> <span class="text"> There is another image of a house on a corner that speaks to me, this one taken from the back and also from the side ("Schrage Avenue and 126th Street, Whiting, Indiana, 1999"). The cropping of the image on the left and at the top allows us to see only part of a two-story house, making central the unattached brick one-car garage beside it, which forms a backward L with the house. The wall of the garage facing us at a slight diagonal has two windows dressed with Venetian blinds; there are window boxes beneath them luxuriant with flowers, and a set of planters lush with tall greenery forms a border for the patio that extends the length of the garage to the back door of the house. Against that wall of the garage, framed by the windows, between two shorter standing planters and a single hanging planter, stands a birdbath, which serves as a pedestal for a statue of the Madonna, who stands in a bed of flowers, and whose head seems to be adorned with flowers. This is not the only backyard shrine that Cialdella captures in the series--Madonnas recur quietly throughout these increasingly Hispanic working-class neighborhoods--but the composition of this backyard, the meticulous care with which this shrine to domesticity has been created, against a backdrop just beyond the garage of refinery smokestacks and holding tanks, is nothing short of breathtaking. It is a perfectly composed photograph of a perfectly composed backyard, one particularly important corner of someone's yard, of someone's life, where one assertion of what is holy, human, and beautiful is starkly set against a different assertion of power, value, and meaning. The white Madonna, in her humble and tiny uprightness, invites comparison with the equally white but more massive oil tank. Between them, of course, with its broad white door, is the garage, brick citadel and ornamented refuge for the idle and protected automobile, around which so much of this cross-cultural dialogue revolves.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Speaking of garages, when I was old enough to throw a basketball ten feet into the air, my dad nailed a backboard to our two-car garage. Cialdella's image of a '57 Chevy up on a jack, inside the tiny fenced backyard of a house in Whiting, with a much-used basketball standard framing the scene like one of those Roman pines in a Claude Lorrain landscape ("'57 Chevy, Whiting, Indiana, 1999"), well, it takes me back to my home court, where I'm in a tight man-to-man defense against myself as I play both teams, coaches, referees, scorer, and crazed announcer: "He shoots, he scores, and he was fouled!" But our fence was a white picket fence, not chain link; and there was a big yard beyond the fence shaded by an ash tree and another lovely Colorado spruce.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Cialdella's image, beyond the associations it creates for me personally, provides a sparsely eloquent take on a Northwest Indiana male version of the American dream. It's all there, safe behind a fence with a gate he can lock: his home, his ride, his game. To put it another way, we could think of the court, the car, and the home as a sequence of settings in which an Indiana boy must hold his own as he moves toward manhood. The license plate, dated 1999, historicizes the scene in an interesting way, as it marks the '57 Chevy as a classic. That this icon of Indiana car culture is on a jack, under a slightly Leaning Tower of Basketball, its flag of a net slightly shredded, casts something of a pall over that dream, shrinking it and fencing it in a bit, so as to make it seem somewhat claustrophobic and endangered.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Obviously, what I find so compelling about Cialdella's Calumet Series is that he not only gives us the Region as that place where steel was made, where products were manufactured, stored, and shipped, where the nation flexed its great industrial muscles for all the world to see, but he also shows us where people dwelled in this landscape, by showing us their houses, their garages, their yards, their flowerbeds; we see where they shopped, where they worshipped, where they picnicked, and where they played. Recreation is a theme that runs throughout, forming yet another type of juxtaposition that Cialdella excels in capturing. In the foreground of one of my favorite photographs, "Lake Calumet Inlet, Chicago, Illinois, 2002 (closed Acme Steel Coke Plant in distance)," you see a bait bucket, a cooler, a Weber grill, a lawn chair, and a fishing pole on the weedy bank of a tiny river or cove. Nothing else is needed for the imagination to conjure the absent fisherman (absence, in fact, is ever-present in these images). There are actually three absent fishermen here, the others suggested by two more lawn chairs left up the shore, facing in the opposite direction, suggesting that we are on a peninsula. More than the strange choreography of abandoned lawn chairs and fishing equipment, it is the jagged sawtooth outline of smokestacks and factories on the distant horizon that unsettles the scene, the upper half of which is dominated by a leaden sky.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Cialdella often splits an image between the idyllic foreground and the industrial background, between play and work, sometimes on a straight horizontal axis, sometimes on a diagonal. In one of my favorite photos, "Calumet Park Beach, Chicago, 2003," a family sprawls on a Lake Michigan beach with a power plant looming in the background down the shore. There are several beach recreation scenes in the series that remind me of Dudley paintings, but they are darker, and the industrial background is more ominous and somehow threatening. In what for me is one of his most iconic Indiana South Shore Un-Posters, Cialdella juxtaposes an empty outdoor basketball court, just a rectangular slab of concrete with a backboard planted in it, against a set of four huge refinery tanks ("Amoco Park, Hammond, Indiana, 1989"). More than half of the image is gray sky, with power lines strung across it, suggesting to me an empty musical score. A few short evergreens outlined against one of the tanks are the only evidence that this is not the moon or Saudi Arabia, but Indiana. There is also a photograph of the empty ball field; you could call it "No Field of Dreams" or "Field of Dreams Deferred." Plainspoken Gary Cialdella calls it "Baseball Field, Whiting Park, Whiting, Indiana, 1999 (East Chicago steel mills in distance)," and that's what we see: the right side of an infield and right field beyond it, shot through the backstop, with the East Chicago mills at a distance breaking the horizon--another evocative use of chain link fencing, a part of the visual vocabulary of this series that I need more time to think about. And while I'm at it, there are carnival scenes to consider, where the fun is clearly over, the machinery waiting to be hauled away.</span><br /> <span class="text"> Cialdella creates great visual poetry of empty streets and empty parking lots, of billboards and the undersides of overpasses. These images will reward all the attention one can give them. They are a lasting tribute, a most moving picture, of this storied, steel-girded Region.</span></span> <!--EndFragment--> </span></span> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/susancarr/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>3084</o:Words> <o:Characters>17581</o:Characters> <o:Company>Carr Cialdella Photography</o:Company> <o:Lines>146</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>35</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>21590</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG /> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting /> <w:PunctuationKerning /> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas /> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables /> <w:DontGrowAutofit /> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables /> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx /> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> </span></span><style type="text/css"></style><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; 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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--></span></span></meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> <span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="text"><span style="line-height: 150%; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /> </span></span></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--EndFragment--> </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></span></p> <p style="line-height: 200%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>John Ruff is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Valpo Core at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana.</em></span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> </font></span><br>
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