FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BUFFALO, NY - Fall Line Press, in collaboration with Burchfield Penney Art Center, announces publication of Mark Maio: Against The Grain, a unique view by photographer Mark Maio and critic Anthony Bannon about the historic Great Lakes grain route from Duluth to Buffalo and about the union men who worked it. The 208-page hardcover book is illustrated with 106 photographs with introduction by Brooks Jenson, publisher and editor of LensWork.

Maio’s photographs are the last and most thorough to document the union that unloaded the giant Great Lakes grain ships. The union workers called themselves “scoopers,” formally the Grain Shovelers, Local 109. They worked the holds of schooners and later the coal and diesel driven ships that mastered the 95,000 square miles of tricky lake waters, as well as the narrow rivers that snaked into the harbors of lake cities. These five lakes formed the world’s largest inland waterway, stretching between westerly farms and eastern industry in the United States and Canada, serving to unify a rapidly growing America poised to use in 1825 a new route, the Erie Canal, to an expanded market, from the interior of the Great Plains territories to the Atlantic seaboards of Europe, the American states, and the emerging provinces of Canada.

Against The Grain documents the route from farm to canal, from field to ship, family to family, the descendants of Swedish farmers and the Irish often indentured immigrants who shoveled the dangerous dream from Albany to Lake Erie: from Syracuse to Buffalo, beset by threatening malaria riddled swamps before a final torment, the deep stone shelf. And underground cliff that outlined the Niagara Frontier.

These brave settlers, both the grain and harbor men, developed, bought, and sold across a thousand-mile trade route to create an industrial architecture for land and water that inspired the modern era with its pure and direct sympathy between form and function. The grain elevator storage tower, in fact, was invented in 1942 in the Buffalo harbor.

Bannon’s text develops such a long view, beginning with the geology and archeology of Kansas and along the shores of the inland seas connecting an important gateway to the west with the midland territory, a vast territory where buffalo roamed and Wyatt Earp learned how to marshal. The story continues, from harvest to transshipment and then from Buffalo to the 364-mile canal to Albany and the Hudson River New York City. The fulcrum of this narrative was the scoopers and the proud, independent culture they created, working from the early promises of the New World, through potato famine and political strife, to create unions that protected hard work with fair trade - until machines overtook them in 2003. Maio was alone to document the process and its last day.

Edited by William Boling, Fall Line Press Publisher, and designed by Dolores Lusitana, artist and founder of Situation Book, a California design firm, Against the Grain is available at the Burchfield Penney at SUNY Buffalo State, as well as FallLinePress.com.