DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA.- The Center for Documentary Studies presents “What Helps Dodge Helps YOU.” In 1986 the Dodge Steel Castings factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, closed down. More than one hundred people lost their jobs, and local businesses suffered the impact. That same year, developer Willard Rouse breached the longtime height restriction on buildings in Philadelphia, set by law to stay within bounds of the peak of William Penn’s statue atop City Hall, a fixture since 1896. Coincidentally the Penn statue, and the iron and bronze work in City Hall’s tower, were manufactured at the site of the Dodge Steel Castings factory by Tacony Iron and Metal Works, which closed in 1910 and burned in 1914—during filming of a movie called “The Gods of Fate.”

“The slew of downtown construction that followed [Rouse’s move in 1986] dwarfed City Hall, which now cannot be seen from many directions: a fitting symbol for the triumph of private property values over the public realm,” writes photographer Brian C. Moss, whose documentary project What Helps Dodge Helps YOU will be on display at CDS throughSeptember 27, 2003.

“At Dodge, the promise of economic and physical security has been exposed as a lie,” Moss continues. “Industry withdrew, leaving a toxic eyesore and an economic wasteland. Rouse’s Liberty Place Towers helped to create a glut of unused older office space. Downtown was remade, but Philadelphia’s net loss from the 1980s in terms of jobs, population, industry, and tax base is staggering.”

Using a trailer-mounted pinhole camera—built on the Dodge factory grounds out of pallets, timber, tractor-trailer doors, tires, hard hats, and signs from the rubble at the site—Moss made ten-foot-square images of the broken-down factory and its surroundings, “a notorious illegal dump site.” Hour-long exposures in full sun, using an f-stop of 1,150 (1/16 aperture, 72-inch focal length), were made on 40-inch-square paper negatives and then contact printed. Hung in three rows of three, they make a complete, giant image.

As part of the project, Moss also made medium-format black-and-white photographs inside the factory, collected found artifacts, conducted historical research, and audiotaped a tour of the foundry with a man who worked there for thirty years. The project culminated in an exhibition at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia and a booth at an annual local historical celebration, Tacony Day.

The pinhole camera “mode of representation now appears uncannily appropriate,” writes Moss. “In a sense the photographic process mirrors the production process that went on within the factory. In the old foundry, scrap metal was melted white-hot and poured from the ladle through a hole into a negative where it cooled until the mold was smashed and the final product emerged. This parallels the process of pinhole photography, but with this camera the scrap becomes the receptacle for light streaming through the pinhole to create a paper negative, from which a positive will later be generated.

“The choice of a technologically primitive and archaic form of witnessing is congruent with the outdated mode of industry it represents, and consistent with a wish to see simply and straightforwardly what has been left in the wake of that industry’s demise.”

The title of the project, and the exhibit, is taken from a quote on a sign found inside the Dodge factory—now mounted on the front of the trailer-camera above the pinhole: “Jobs depend on sales, Sales depend on prices, Prices depend on costs, Costs depend on you: What helps Dodge helps YOU.”

The trailer-camera will be on display at CDS, along with oversized pinhole images, medium-format photographs, and historical materials about the Dodge factory.

Moss, who received his MFA in photography from the California Institute of the Arts and BFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art, has had numerous solo and group exhibitions. He has been the recipient of artist-in-residence grants from the City of Los Angeles for the past two years and was named to a visual arts residency at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in 2001, along with other awards and residencies. He has published, lectured, taught workshops, and conducted projects as a visiting artist on pinhole photography, among other topics.

Artist’s Statement

My work is a reflection of my interests and how I look at the world. The projects I have worked on have been varied in form and in their goals, but they are unified by a heightened scrutiny of the world around us. Recurring concerns in my work are issues relating to saving, recording, and memory. These issues are generated by aspects of my practice: photographing, trash picking, collecting and archiving images, and using found objects. In the past, I focused on urban decay, and specifically the impact of the 1980s economy on the social and architectural heritage of Philadelphia. My documentary project What Helps Dodge Helps YOU was the culmination of that body of work.

In photographic work and installations, I have examined the differences and similarities between personal and commercial images, journalistic photography’s obsession with crowds, and the possibility of reframing found images and altering or undermining their original use and meaning. This is a strategy that I have often employed, not just photographically, but with many subjects and mediums. I will make minimal changes to pre-existing things—reframing, recombining, or removing aspects to represent the subject. By presenting multiple images or states of a subject—physically, photographically, textually, or even by evoking memories—a viewer must consider a nuanced and multilayered subject. My digital work includes a series of altered photographs that I have shown in many different forms, including Web animation. One of the issues addressed in this work is the potential for digital technology to alter perceptions of history, as well as to trouble the notion of documentary “truth.”

A more recent subject of my work is the contemporary landscape as informed by historical ideas about nature and the sublime. Studying how we view and shape the world around us, and how that world has been portrayed, exposes the landscape as a space of cultural contention. In this pictorial space, the contradictions and false oppositions of landscape can be explored. My recent color photographs explore this visual space and how various competing groups use it and communicate through it. These images are concerned with the impact of culture on the landscape in all its forms. Many of these images are shot from a moving vehicle, because for many people this is the primary space from which we view the exterior world. I juxtapose still and blurred images to call attention to the artifice of the captured moment. The photographs focus on gardens and unused land, conspicuous roadside displays, blank billboards and bits of advertising text set against the city, the suburbs and spaces in between.—Brian C. Moss