Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Just then, I heard a noise. My pulse rose, and I froze.

  Csük has had plenty of run-ins and close calls at the Steel. She’s nearly bumped into all kinds of vagrants and wanderers, and always spotted them before they spotted her. Once, up on a crane with only one way down, she heard voices in the room below her. She stood still for a half hour until the men left. On a different occasion, she nearly crossed paths with a lunatic from West Chester, who shortly thereafter was arrested and found to be in possession of many guns. Two hundred feet up, she’s nearly stepped through a staircase missing four rungs. While poking around with another photographer in 2005, she suffered her closest call. In blast furnace E, she encountered a handful of people, and the pair ran to hide in a dark corner of blast furnace D. On her way through the cavernous room, she fell through a rectangular hole where casts of molten iron were drained from brick channels into railroad cars below. According to the other photographer, one moment Csük was there, and the next she was mostly gone. “Had it not been for her backpack and camera and tripod, she’d have fallen down to the bottom,” he told me. “It was far enough to kill her.” It was, more precisely, two stories down to the ground. The photographer grabbed Csük by the armpits and pulled her out. She’d smashed an expensive Linhof lens and scraped her left leg, but suffered no other injuries. As a result, she never rushes inside the Steel. To this day, the other photographer, who has returned to the Steel many times with Csük, calls her Indiana Jane.

  Csük reappeared and said, “There’s something really magical from here to here. The color is all there.” Not wanting to seem anxious, I didn’t mention the noise. Then she told me to follow her. She led the way down dark staircases, around corners—none of it familiar. I was sure it was a new route, until, outside the building, I saw our footprints leading in. I was impressed. Csük told me that she’s always felt her way around, yielding to whatever draw she senses, as if blind. She just trusts her instincts, and she’s bombarded with things that catch her eye. Of shooting rust, Csük admitted, “It’s funny bringing life from something so lifeless.” She seemed, all of a sudden, like a field biologist or a mountaineer.

  She walked up a corrugated ramp, under a wire fence, and along an elevated trestle on a warped platform. At one point, she stopped, looked both ways before proceeding, and told me to follow close behind her, because we’d be visible. Then she ducked under the wire fence and walked down a different ramp, into another building.

  From a ledge in this building, she looked west, pointed to a giant exhaust valve inside a cage of beams, and said, “Oh wow. I wish I could photograph that.” The valve was at least sixty feet up, overhanging a tangly courtyard. “I really love what’s happening there now. With the red and the black forming, it’s very intriguing. I can’t get it. You get used to that here.” She couldn’t get it because her tripod needed to be stationary, on terra firma. Rigging wouldn’t work, and was too risky. She said, “That is so jungle looking. So tribal.” She turned around, ready to keep exploring, and then turned back. “Now, why can’t that be accessible?” Then, lower, almost directed at the steelyard itself, she said, “You’re killing me.”

  Csük made her way higher, to a perch with an expansive view. She looked out at snowy roofs, admiring the way snow collected on different surfaces, angles, features. Off of one spot, the wet snow avalanched, leaving stripes. On another, the snow caught drips, and appeared speckled. On a curved section, the snow faded gradually away. Csük noticed a wire hanging down she hadn’t seen before. She said, “I’m just taking it all in.” As she later told me, she has no problem standing somewhere and looking and looking and looking. She’s patient. She’s not a fast talker, or a fast walker, or a fast eater, or a fast typer, or a fast anything, except maybe driver. She rarely drinks coffee, and never before shooting. I had mistaken Csük’s refusal to rush earlier at the coffee shop: it’s not stoicism, but a focus so intense it slows her down. I watched Csük as she watched, and saw a long stare take hold of her. Her eyes got glassy. She kneeled. All of a sudden, she sprung back to planet Earth. “I don’t know why that car is stopping,” she said. She told me to stay where I was, at the edge of the window frame, just out of sight. In the meantime, she froze. “They’re not looking up here, are they?”

  Csük took her first photo class for the hell of it, after a few unsatisfying years working as a medical transcriptionist for a handful of vascular surgeons in a medical office next to Lehigh Valley Hospital. Realizing she needed more, that the nine-to-five was not for her, she considered going into psychology or design. She weighed the decision for weeks and decided to pursue the latter at Northampton Community College. Her studies began with Drawing 1. She hadn’t drawn since childhood, and even then, hadn’t really drawn. Her parents had let her doodle on a wall, and while her brother drew people and houses and trees, all she drew was abstract shapes. Her mother had attended art school, had won awards for her paintings, and never pushed Csük toward art. If anything, Csük grew up intimidated by the artistic talent in her family. Since then, she’d been scared of drawing and art. At Northampton, she learned how to draw, and discovered that she had what one teacher called artistic dyslexia. She drew light stuff dark, and dark stuff light. She drew negatives. Realizing this, she took a photography course. She liked it so much, they gave her the keys to the darkroom.

  In her twenties, after a boyfriend introduced her to museums and galleries, the opera and Philip Glass, she decided she wanted to further her photography studies. She applied to the Rochester Institute of Technology, and in November 2003 was accepted for the term starting the following year. At the end of that month, on a warm breezy day, she was on her way up Perry Street when low light coming through the ruins of the Steel caught her eye. She rode her bike toward the Steel, hopping off at a fence. She grabbed the fence, captivated, and resolved to return immediately with her first digital camera. Two days later, not knowing any better, she walked the route we had, without scouting for cops first. She felt only anticipation. A cop, seeing her, blared from his car, “You have now entered private property.” She turned around and returned to the bridge, until she was out of sight. Then she scampered down to the rocks along the Lehigh River and followed it a half mile to the Steel. She peeked over the levee. Then she ran across the train tracks, and into the rustiest place in America. Her heart was pounding. A train passed just as she gained entry, hissing as she stepped in.

  Her curiosity became a pursuit, and before long it seemed like a worthy photography project she could complete before she ran off to Rochester. She figured it was a thirty-day project. In the ensuing eight months, she spent forty-six days at the Steel. By the start of the semester, she didn’t want to go to photography school. She wanted to keep shooting rust.

  At RIT, Csük began studying photojournalism, but it wasn’t for her. She wanted to learn as much technical craft as possible, so she switched to advertising—which meant a lot of time in a studio. She thinks this has benefited her. When she graduated, a professor asked her what she planned to do. She told the professor that she wanted to be a fine art photographer, and the professor just laughed. He said, “Do you know how hard that is?” Says Csük: “I had no encouragement. It was just cold, like boot camp.”

  Now, nine years later, almost to the day, she—the country’s preeminent rust photographer—was still at the Steel. It was her 377th day there.

  The car moved on, and so did Csük. She descended convoluted flights of stairs, walked back up the ramp, ducked under the wire, looked both ways, and proceeded a hundred feet down the elevated track. She stopped, took a left, ducked under the wire, and walked down a different ramp.

  By then, I had begun to look around the way Csük does. I pointed out some compelling swirly drips on an overhead pipe. Csük had seen it many times and tried to photograph it on at least a half dozen occasions. “It’s mesmerizing,” she said. Then: “I wish—I can’t get up higher. It’s torture. I’m constantly tortured with photos that I can’t get.”
To capture the swirls, she said, she’d need to be there early, on a snowy day, so that the reflecting light bounced up without lens flare. There was determination in her words. The pipe wasn’t going anywhere.

  Halfway down the ramp, Csük caught an iridescent glow fifteen feet up on a boiler. “It’s beautiful, but I only shoot straight on,” she explained. Her head lowered, she scanned at shoulder height and saw something. “Wow, it’s beautiful. If you just shift your angle, all these colors come out.” She extended the tripod to four feet. “It’s kind of interesting. I’m like a hawk. Who would see that? I don’t know if I can capture it.” She positioned her camera, took a few frames, and said, “A lot of people would say, ‘I got it.’ I don’t feel like I got it.” Then: “I’m never done with it. I just keep coming back.”

  She led onward, stepping over rusty things, onto rusty grates, through rusty walls and door frames. She leaned against railings and beams that seemed like they might give or break. Over crackly ground, littered with clanky debris, she somehow walked quietly. Through a spring-loaded gate, she made her way, seeing that it didn’t clack shut. When she sneezed—just once—she did so quietly. The space seemed like the inside of a drum: taut, loud, dark, and echoey. She walked back to ground level, and then up some other stairs, to a ledge, and said, “I like what’s happening over there, with the water and the reds, but there’s not a good composition.” She walked by and then looked back. “I just love those areas of red over there.”

  Quickly, because they were exposed, she climbed up two flights of stairs and stopped on a platform covered in cracked rust an inch deep. She was hunting for a better angle. Up there, pointing at a wall of orange and brown, she said, “It’s amazing how the colors change. On another day, that’d be blue—a glowing blue.” From the platform, I heard a male voice below. I told Csük. Immediately, she backed into a dark room and stood there, silent. She looked at me, and said, “Fuck. It’s Joe.”

  Earlier that morning, Csük had told me about Joe. Joe Koch. For twenty-six years, he’d worked at the Steel as a safety officer, and was now employed there as a security guard. A handful of times, he’d stopped her at the gate on Founder’s Way and revoked her pass. The last time this happened, he tried to dissuade her by delivering a forty-five-minute lecture on copper thieves, who, he said, would probably kill and bury her, at which point Koch would have to get the cadaver dogs out. Csük had looked at me and said seriously, “He’s probably here today.”

  Csük was first officially granted access to the Steel in 2004 by a local developer. By the terms of an indemnification agreement, she was supposed to stick to the safety of the street level and stay out of dangerous areas like the blast furnaces. When the Sands acquired the land, her access was transferred. Nevertheless, security guards—many of whom had worked at the Steel most of their lives—stopped her regularly, revoking her pass. They wanted her to cough up $30 an hour to be guided around the site, saying that it was not a safe place for a young woman. Csük, though, had a friend in a Sands executive in Las Vegas, who saw that her pass was reinstated indefinitely. In time, one of the casino’s designers got in touch. He wanted to see what she’d been up to all those years.

  When Csük showed the images she’d made, the man was impressed. So were the new owners. Many of the security guards—the lifers—were floored. “They just never knew that rust could be beautiful,” Csük said. “They say, ‘I just never saw rust that way before.’ ”

  Recognizing the obsessed visionary in their presence, the casino hired Csük to document the redevelopment of the steelworks. Redevelopment meant destruction of the place that had enthralled her for years. From 2007 through 2009, all but one of the buildings surrounding the blast furnaces—the mills, the foundries, the forges, the tool shop, the machine shop, the basic oxygen furnace, open hearth furnace, the electric furnace, the Bessemer converter, the sales office—were gutted, destroyed, and leveled. Parking lots were paved in their place. Unobtrusive landscaping was installed. Around the blast furnaces—the only sacred thing remaining, according to Csük—a fence was erected.

  Csük documented this massive transformation, thinking a book would come out of it. She says it was like watching a slow death. Many of these images, in her collection Industrial Steel, seem reverential, as if the steelyard were an iconic peak or pristine canyon. The environs and their contents are clear: walls, rooms, cranes, coils of wire. They’re shot like landscapes, at dawn, at dusk, under moonlight, in fog, under a blanket of snow. Csük says she spent hours just watching how the light changed on the yards. She says she photographed the place as people photographed the West.

  Documenting the demolition of the place where she’d become a photographer was just as difficult to reconcile. It forced her to focus on more than just steel and rust, and branch out—into slate and scrap yards and trees. She did this so that her spirit wouldn’t die. Then the economy tanked, and the Sands put the book idea on the backburner.

  Now that the blast furnaces are all that remain, any further damage is traumatic. Trespassers have vandalized parts of it. Copper thieves have stolen bits and pieces of it. Set producers on the movie Transformers 2 have transformed part of it. Death, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, is the mother of beauty, but only to a point. Hours before, when she climbed to the fourth floor of blast furnace D and noticed that metal pipes had been removed from the stove, she’d looked down, and said, “Oh my gosh, look at that pile. That’s the guts being ripped out. It’s sad.” She wants the Steel to suffer a natural death, not an accelerated, assisted, man-made one.

  In fact, one of the first things Csük had said to me, in her car, was that if she had a time machine, she’d go back ten years, to the time when the yards had been abandoned but were still open, authentic, raw, and undisturbed. At the time, I didn’t get what she meant. The place seemed all of those things to me. Now, she said, the only way to recapture the magical and mysterious feeling of that era was to sneak in. Nighttime exploration, she said, “provides the greatest opportunity for an unadulterated experience.” Later she told me that if she won the lottery, she’d buy the steelyard and preserve it.

  For two long minutes, we stood still as stones in the dark room. I wondered if the bearded railroad employee in the pickup truck had called us in. If Csük was nervous, she didn’t show it. She poked out into the light, the rust crunching under her feet loudly. She looked around. Then she climbed another flight of stairs, where she found a vividly green and red pipe tee to photograph.

  “Right now, the colors are just amazing,” she said. “It’s perfect. I mean, look at the colors. Everything’s alive. I’ve been here before, but it’s never quite looked like this.” She set up the tripod five feet high, took a few shots, and then got excited. She said, “Oh, I know where we gotta go.” Before she went anywhere else, she stood before her tripod, on her tiptoes. Her head leaned left. Steam rose from her breath. The shutter-release cable dangled, swinging back and forth. She thought about her shot. Then she moved the tripod back a few feet, as far as she could, up against a railing. Behind it loomed a five-story drop. The sound of dripping came from all around.

  “I’m constantly distracted,” she said. “I’m shooting this, but—this is nice. I’m pretty happy right here. I think I got a reward today.” By a reward, Csük meant a shot that she loved and could sell. Of the 28,093 rust shots she’d taken before today, 113 were rewards. On this day alone, she got 3.

  Depending on their size, Csük’s images sell for $800 to $3,200. She sold somewhere between one hundred and two hundred prints in 2012. She sold one, forty-six inches by ninety-six inches and printed on metal, for $30,000. Most are printed on Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper, with archival pigment prints. When I first held one, at her studio, I was almost convinced the image was 3-D, on account of its richness. The detail in the image was so fine that I felt a hunger and had to fight the urge to reach into the print. I admit to telling Csük that I hoped to sell a lot of books so that I could afford one.
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br />   “This makes you think of a kite of color, of shapes,” she said. I had not thought about a kite. She took a dozen frames and then packed up. Before continuing, she explained her avoidance of the obvious and her desire to look for layers beyond beauty. She said, “A lot of people look at my stuff, and they know it’s rust, but they never think it’s rust. It can’t be too literal.”

  Csük has been told that one of her abstracts looks like a heart valve. She thinks it looks like an alien planet. Another, she thinks, resembles an elephant. One suggests a mountain range. One suggests The Old Man and the Sea. Another suggests a vase. She has been told that her rust photos evoke: a Navajo bird beak, a snow leopard, a field of red poppies, a forest, leaves in snow, a nebula, an amoeba, an abstract nude drawing, the World Trade towers. I’ll admit to claiming that one image looked like Einstein. She calls some “primordial,” “futuristic,” “prehistoric,” or “like the fabric of space time”—whatever that looks like. She recognizes a draw to places that feel otherworldly: cement mills, caves, Death Valley. She dreams of shooting rust on a NASA launch pad. But she has done her best work in the town where she grew up, a mile from her home. She uses words like ethereal, magical, emergent, spirited. In all of our conversations, she rarely swore. She cites Carl Jung’s stream of consciousness, and a philosophy of being, thinking, and seeing described in a book called Wabi-Sabi. But for her slight New Jersey accent, she would blend in easily in Boulder or San Francisco.