BEAUTY & THE FACTORY-THE STANLEY WORKS
Stanley Steel
Photographing in Stanley's plants was as foreign to my eye as in Africa and Asia, where I worked with artisans. Responding only visually at first, I soon developed great respect for the ingenuity in industry and its highly skilled workers. Sadlly, just as rural artisans around the world are vanishing, so too are the o nce es s enti al f acto ri es throughout New England.
C.B.S.
BEAUTY & THE FACTORY-THE STANLEY WORKS
PHOTOGRAPHS & COMMENTARY
by CLARE BRETT SMITH
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Photographs & Text for BEAUTY & THE FACTORY-THE STANLEY WORKS by Clare Brett Smith
Library of Congress Card Catalogue # ISBN 978-0-578-08299-8. Copyright Š 2011 by Clare Brett Smith All Rights Reserved
Clare Brett Smith 80 Mountain Spring Road Farmington, Connecticut, 06032 United States of America
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BEAUTY & THE FACTORY-THE STANLEY WORKS
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The Stanley Works The Stanley Works was central to New Britain. An employer of hundreds, it was itself a community, almost a family. Until the multiple lanes of Route 72 bisected the town in the 1970s, the central role of Stanley was clearly visible. It was only blocks away from the Olmstead-designed Walnut Hill Park, from the New Britain Museum of American Art and the comfortable Queen Anne and Victorian houses nearby. With Stanley and other high quality manufacturers, like Fafnir, Landers, North & Judd and American Hardware, New Britain, bustling and prosperous, was frequently described as "The Hardware City of the World". By 1980-81, when I took these pictures, things were changing. Production began to move offshore to cheaper labor and advantageous tax structures, and mergers and acquisitions were the new form of growth. Of Stanley's original production lines, now in 2011, only the tape rule production remains in New Britain. I wanted to photograph in a factory as a way of learning to photograph stronger images, tougher sights. I didn't set out to make a documentary, but I see now, thirty years later, that this collection of images has a nostalgic flavor and memories of an earlier time.
Clare Brett Smith, 2011
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Lodged in my mind then were notions of oppressive 19th Century factories, like those in Charles Dickens' books or William Blake's "dark satanic mills". Seeing someone chained to a workbench fit my image of factory work as a kind of slavery. It took a while for me to notice this woman's big smile and to realize that the restraints on her arms were for her safety. Directly responsive to her foot pedal, the chains held her arms out of danger as the high-power press slammed down.
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Still blinded by my misconceptions, this image of a machine swallowing up its operator seemed significant, but it too was a safety measure. A fly wheel was spinning at high speed inside the oversize hood, and would have been very dangerous had it been out in the open and had anything become caught in it.
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Soon I saw the grace and economies of motion, a ballet really. I admired the precise timing and skills of workers, like this man, who fed a steel ribbon evenly into a machine which then cut exact lengths each time he tapped his foot pedal.
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Pictures are more interesting to me when they offer, in some way, more than just what meets the eye. With her long blond hair, this young woman could have been the princess in Sleeping Beauty, who pricked her finger on a spindle and fell into a long sleep until the prince wakened her with a kiss. Actually this young woman was stamping tiny holes for rivets. With today's OSHA rules, she would have to tie back her Goldilocks.
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Before robots and extensive automation, a widely varied production like Stanley's depended on precision and nimble fingers.
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Except for the loud hard sound of machinery, the atmosphere in the factory was more domestic than I had imagined. Women often wore flowered aprons and there were house plants on the window sills.
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Personal workbench of a set-up man, in the tool division
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Unidentified section of the assembly line
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Ready for plating
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Three friendly ladies, on the orange paint line, took a break from spraying and drying for their photograph. After a few visits. I saw that black and white film was much too bleak. I needed color film for the different kinds of light, day and night, fluorescent, incandescent and the strangely altered light coming through tinted factory windows.
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It looked like a restaurant steam table, but here, in the finishing area, new metal parts were being plated by electrolyis.
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Assembly line section, Hand Tools Division
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Rolls of steel for hinges, though it looks more like a glimpse inside Fort Knox.
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Assembly line style
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At Stanley Steel, the boss
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Control Station
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N.Ringquist. one of the few non-Polish names. New Britain, with its large Polish population, has been nicknamed New Britsky.
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The measuring tape assembly line
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At Stanley Steel
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Brass coils feeding a blanking press, Hardware Division
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Huge yellow "fingers" polishing with abrasives in the Hardware Divison.
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The machine at his side rolls steel under heavy pressure down from 4 inches to 3/16ths of an inch.
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Yellow Paint Line, for tape rules. Yellow and black are Stanley's colors, as in the sequence of six images beginning on page 41 and ending here.
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A protective gauntlet that wouldn't be out of place at King Arthur's Round Table
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Welder and his helmet, protection for his eyes from the blindingly bright ultra-violet sparks
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They called it the Pickle Yard at Stanley Steel, where steel is cleansed and purified so it can be plated flawlessly.
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Doorway into the Finishing Room, Stanley Tools
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Annealing ovens at Stanley Steel
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A room off the assembly line, a mystery then - and now.
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Like a stage set, rolls of paper-wrapped steel, protected after pickle yard cleansing.
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"Fire burn and cauldron bubble", from MacBeth, or maybe more like geyser pools at Yellowstone Park.
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More mysterious atmosphere, the plating vats
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Chrome plating of hinges. Knobby objects hanging at left are "dummies" to surround the hinge leaves with electric current during electrolysis. The hinge leaves have been formed with a progressive die, "a lovely piece of work" say the engineers, and "no one ever made a better hinge", where, starting from a block of steel, the ingenious one-piece die forces each of the bends, rolls, turns and cuts in sequence.
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At a slow shutter speed, spinning wire
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Hinges, complete with two side leaves and hinge pin, ready for paint or plating.
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Feeding wire to form the headed pin between two hinge leaves.
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Steel, tightly baled
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Stanley smokestack, the last one standing. The rooftop factory whistle at left is on display at the New Britain Industrial Museum along with examples, now artifacts, of New Britain's ingenious machinery and renowned products.
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Plating room window
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Outside Stanley Steel at night
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Mottled, discolored, but still beautiful factory windows
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Exterior, Stanley Steel, Burritt Street. It doesn't really look like this, even at night, but film differs in the way it reacts to light. Kodachrome daylight-type film "sees" artificially lit night scenes as more saturated than they would appear in daylight. Knowing that characteristic made it possible for me to transform the gray reality of the factory facade into something decidedly more dramatic.
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The Stanley Smokestack from the Lake Street bridge. Most of the former factory buildings are no longer used for manufacturing but house offices and the Grove Hill Medical Center complex.
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Conveyor belt, Stanley Steel
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Brass plated steel coils
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Huge rollers at Stanley Steel. Reflecting various light sources and spinning constantly, they created their own shimmering Niagara Falls. Some of the steelworkers wondered what I found so interesting when I propped my camera up on a tripod and focused on the flow of the rollers, but, when they looked into my view finder, they agreed that it was really nice, nice colors.
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Thanks especially to Fred Gear, of Farmington, an engineer whose working life, 1948-1981, was spent at the Stanley Works, as Supervisor in Manufacture and Engineering. In 1980 he was about to retire when he was assigned to show me around the works. His memory for people, places and process is strong, and, in 2011, when I finally put these limages together, he knew exactly what I had seen. More identifications were provided by Wiilliam Bower of Avon and a wealth of memories by Lois Blomstrann, a founder of New Britain's Industrial Museum, and I'm grateful too to the late Donald W. Davis, then the CEO of Stanley, for permission to explore the plants.
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At the Stanley Works 1981
Clare Brett Smith has lived most of her life in New England. She graduated from the Putney School and from Smith College. She is the mother of s ev en , g r an d m o t h er o f t en an d g r eat grandmother of eight. Clare has worked with artisans all over the world, first with her husband, Burges, in their importing business and for twenty-two years, she was president of the non-profit Aid to Artisans. She has been honored with many awards for her work, creativity and leadership and is considered a pioneer in combining marketing with cultural preservation and economic development. Now retired, she has returned to her other major interest, photography. Her work has been exhibited in one-person shows in the United States and abroad. She taught photography at Taft School, Zone VI Workshops in Vermont and Studio Arts Centers International in Florence, Italy. Her fifteen books testify to her keen visual sense. Many are family-oriented but four recent books (plus this one) are of more general interest: Oaxaca, Mexico 1970-1979 Japan, Attention to Detail Men & Boys/Women & Children,Pakistan 1979 China 1977★Character
Š 2011 Copyright Clare Brett Smith