Bio:
Patricia Layman Bazelon immigrated to the UuSA from England in 1961. In 1979 she moved to Buffalo from NYC and began work as a free-lance photographer. While working on a commission for historian Reyner Banham photographing the many grain elevators and industrial buildings for his book, A Concrete Atlantis, Bazelon fell in love with Buffalo’s industrial architecture and continued to photograph it extensively until her death in 1995. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, and the George Eastman House.
Statement:
At the turn of the century, when the manufacture of steel was exploding with new technology, this plant was built on the shores of Lake Erie, just south of Buffalo, New York, for the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company. In 1987, I began to photograph the defunct mills, aware of their imminent demolition under a program of “reclamation.” All of it slated to go. The thousands of workers – men and women of uncommon courage and skill – were long gone, but they had left their marks indelibly. The abandoned buildings evoke these workers in singular and unexpected ways and resonate still with their energy. While the lifespan of this plant was eighty years, its ruins – unlike those of earlier times – stood for barely a decade. – Patricia Layman Bazelon, Steel
