Technology and Craftsmanship

There is nothing somber about the weather here just now. Bright blues and vivid greens and air so fresh that nothing could spoil. I need to baptize myself in it and be cleansed. It will take a lot of good weather to do that.

Technology is cool. There is no getting around that. But so is craftsmanship. We have plenty of one and little of the other. I went to a foundry the other day looking to get a lens plate made for a 19th century lens I bought a while ago. The lens is a big, beautiful brass thing that everyone ooo's and ahhh's over when they see it. The foundry was really more of a machine shop, but it had all sorts of equipment and machinery that I hadn't a clue about. I told the fellow who came out to help me that my father had been a tool and dye maker and he began telling me about the equipment and tools he had, some over a hundred years old. He held the lens in his thick fingers and turned it around with admiration, and said that one of the welders who worked there was a photographer. I thought, sure, everyone is, but the fellow came in and really knew things. He looked at the lens and told me more than I knew. Turns out he studied art at Ohio State and then photography at the San Francisco Art Institute back in the seventies. He had several old Petzval lenses, he said, for his 8x10 view cameras. He took me back in the shop to show me some of the work he had in a storage box in the back. He had some cool old stereopics that fit into a binocular viewer similar to the plastic one I had that contained three-D photos of the National Parks when I was a kid.

I asked about the foundry. He said it had been there since the 1930s. One of the big jobs they did was to make manhole covers. He said that he designed some of them. He liked to think he was still practicing the arts, and I agreed as we looked at some of the big hunks of heavy metal. Walking back to the office, I said I'd like to come back and make some photographs of the machinery and the tools and of the fellows in industrial aprons and gloves posed among them. He didn't say anything to that.

But back to my original point, or what I imagined it to be when I began writing this. As cool as technology is, there are a lot of people doing it. But there aren't so many craftsmen any more. My house was built in the early part of the 20th century, and the details of the interior are of that time. I have tried to find people who can do the same sort of work when I make repairs or minor changes, and it is both very difficult and very expensive. You have to own Full Sail or Hard Rock to build a new house with that sort of craftsmanship. Watching "This Old House" can fool you.

And you can go on and on: old hand made boxes and chests and iron works, the interior of ships and furniture. . . .

The new iMac I bought my mother is way cool. I hooked her up with Hulu.com on that big old screen and she loves the technology, too. Now I want to get one for myself. Old movies like "Legong: Dance of the Virgins" would look really good on it.