Friday, April 12, 2019

A few from the Rubber Reclaiming Factory in Black and White, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Dear Readers, I thought the Kodak Ektar 100 color frames in my previous article were effective at showing the old rubber reclaiming facility at Rubber Way, south of Vicksburg. But my black and white film came back from Praus Productions, and the rubber plant looked especially grungy. Maybe urban decay looks best (best? worst?) in monochrome. (Click any photograph to enlarge to 1600 pixels wide.)
As I wrote before, there is no shortage (tonnage) of rubber tire carcasses lying around at the site. I was surprised to see that some inner tubes were still inflated.
I looked for the Kingfisher again, but no sighting this time. Plenty of water - is it green in summer? I heard gurgling and pulsing - a plugged pipe or drain perhaps? Or Alligator-zilla?
This is the massive machine that once shredded old tires. I wonder when it was built? Might it be mid-20th century? Was it new when it was installed here or brought in as a used item from another company?

These photographs are from Fuji Acros black and white film, exposed at EI=80 in a Leica M2 camera. For the first 5 frames above, I used my 24mm ƒ/3.5 Super-Multi-Coated Pentax Takumar lens via an adapter. The photograph of the rubber machine is from my 35mm ƒ/2.0 Summicron lens. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

We are a rubber recycling company that specializes in scrap inner tubes recycling. Came across these pictures, wondering if you met anyone at this location as we don't know of any human contacts to approach them and help remove the tubes from this property

James Adamson said...

Yeah, It was an amazing idea. We can also use rubber kneader in order to recycle the wasted rubber.