My Rolleiflex 2.8F kept me company on an unexpected trip from NYC back to my hometown in Western Pennsylvania earlier this winter to assist my 95 year old mother after a fall. Despite my acute awareness of her advanced age, some childish part in me and my brothers still expects her to live forever, unlike our Dad who died 32 years ago.
I took the Rollei along as a kind of of security blanket but wasn’t sure whether I would even take it out of my bag. In fact, I used the camera fairly continuously throughout my time there, shooting Portra 400 and one roll of Tri-X. They are a moody batch for sure – the gray landscape matched my mental state, at least at the start of the trip when things with Mom seemed rather uncertain.
The portrait above shows my mother in her glory at her dinner table last Thanksgiving (despite her age, she insisted on cooking). Although she’s not planning to host major holidays at this point, I’m grateful she’s doing better.
All photos were taken in or near Beaver, Pennsylvania except the first and last, taken in the Pittsburgh Airport and on the return flight to NYC.
A county seat of five thousand, Beaver and the towns surrounding it have been home to my family since the 19th century. When I was growing up there industry fueled the economy and defined the landscape. On nighttime walks along the Ohio River you could see the sky ablaze in the east by blast furnaces of Jones and Laughlin Steel and American Bridge Corporation, and to the west by Saint Joe Lead and Crucible Steel.
By the mid 80s when I left for college, almost all of those plants had been shuttered, bringing dire consequences to the community. Hopes for an industrial rebirth in recent years have mostly centered on Royal Dutch Shell’s massive ethylene plastics (“cracker”) plant shown in the background of my photos. Its vapors, by-products of the hyrdo-fracking gas used to make vast quantities of plastic pellets destined to be molded into food takeout carriers and other single-use packages, paint the sky. The largest and most heavily subsidized industrial development in Pennsylvania history, it opened in 2022. The plant’s economic impact and long-term environmental toll are however very much in question.
The fifth photo shows Beaver’s First Christian Church, a highly conservative congregation, no longer associated with its mainline denomination, reflected in a puddle. The penultimate photo shows the 1933 Bridgewater-Rochester bridge, which my paternal grandfather was involved in constructing.
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