A PICTURE WINDOW ON CLEVELAND

It was early modernists who rehabilitated the nineteenth century factory. What Dickens derided in Hard Times Corbusier lionized in Towards a New Architecture. Of course his fascination was purely aesthetical and utilitarian. He didn't seem to notice much the working conditions or environmental impact on local neighborhoods that factories brought to bear. Rather, he was interested in mining them for their minimalist spareness, their geometric simplicity, which when stylized to the n-th degree produced the United Nations building and the McGraw-Hill complex on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

At the neighbor level, things were always more complicated -- one might say byzantine -- and no place indicates that better than Cleveland in our estimation. Indeed, factories and industrial spaces seem to define the city in a way that we find fascinating, complex, distressing and, yes, completely aesthetic. What was left in the wake of nineteenth-century industrialism was not just a legacy of now-crumbling structures but a way of life that is, in some instances, still ratcheting neighborhood life downward. The difference between what we see now in the twenty-first century and, say, what photographers saw in the nineteen sixties comes down to a matter of taste. It is odd to say in our antiaesthetic, postmodern age, but we find the landscapes and interior shots in these photographs to possess a genuine beauty. Perhaps it is because of the nostalgia factor, or that there is a certain attraction in death. It was Nietzsche who in the early throes of the industrial revolution recognized this connection, which modernists quickly seized upon.

What we notice most in making our way through the streets of Cleveland is the marriage between homes and factories and the way the latter are being transformed into the former. Could any city be dealing with its industrial legacy more valiently? Could any urban renewalists than those working in Cleveland be more dogged in metamorphosing a tale of urban blight into a new kind of modernity? We've traveled from the birthplace of the industrial revolution, Manchester, England, to all parts of Eastern Europe and the U.S. and it is our sense that Cleveland has done as good or better a job than any other city its size in countering the negative affects of shall we say, capitalism run amok? Capitalism without a plan?

Of course, to converse with those who are in the trenches, those urban planners left having to do something with the bodies, so to speak, you get the sense that what has been done in the way of ending blight and effecting change isn't nearly enough. Still, each time we travel to the city, six times in the last year, we are impressed yet again by the transformation.

The photos in this series attempt to capture both the beauty and devastation of the dying industrial era. Several of the structures in these images have already been earmarked for renovation and development. Some are in the process of being gutted, transmogrified into impressive new housing units, ones we ourselves would love to live in.

In doing research we have been struck by the paucity of images of factory life during Cleveland's industrial heyday. Our hope is to document what we can in order to construct a photographic legacy, both of what was and what might be.