Inside Wickett & Craig: Photographs of an American Leather Tannery
Leather is part of our everyday lives, but most people never give any thought to what it is or where it comes from. After more than 6 years photographing working cowboys and ranches throughout the American West, I'm accustomed to seeing it everywhere: saddles, reins, bridles, chaps, boots, belts, and countless other pieces of gear. Usually, by the time I photograph it, the leather has already spent years being worked hard.
The Wickett & Craig tannery in Curwensville, Pennsylvania, offered an opportunity to see the other end of that story.
Founded in 1867, Wickett & Craig has been making leather for more than 150 years and is one of the few remaining specialty vegetable tanneries in the United States. The company spent its first 123 years in Toronto before moving to Pennsylvania around 1990, where it now operates a large tannery producing millions of square feet of leather each year.
I went there to photograph the people, machinery, and process behind it.
Hides move through one of the working areas inside Wickett & Craig.
Inside an American Leather Tannery
There isn't much about the inside of Wickett & Craig that feels designed for visitors. It's a working industrial building, and nearly every surface shows evidence of what happens there. Pipes run overhead, hides hang throughout the facility, enormous drums occupy entire sections of the building, and years of water, oils, dyes, tannins, and production have left their marks on the floors, walls, and machinery.
That's exactly what made the place interesting to photograph.
I've always been attracted to working environments where nothing has been cleaned up or arranged for the camera. There is already enough visual information in a place like this. The challenge isn't creating something interesting, but figuring out how to organize what is already happening into a photograph.
Wickett & Craig operates on more than 16 acres and produces roughly 4.5 million square feet of leather annually. Walking through the tannery, the scale of that production is immediately apparent. Hides are stacked, hanging, stretched, soaked, rolled, and fed through machinery as they move from one part of the building to another.
The finished leather most people recognize is still a long way off.
Hides hang over the tanning vats as they move through the vegetable tanning process.
Leather is handled by hand in the tannery's wet processing areas.
Making Vegetable-Tanned Leather
Wickett & Craig specializes in vegetable-tanned leather, a traditional method that uses naturally derived tannins to transform raw cattle hides into leather. Compared with modern chrome tanning, vegetable tanning is a considerably slower process. At Wickett & Craig, the complete transformation takes roughly six weeks.
The hides come from North American cattle and first have to be prepared, rehydrated, dehaired, fleshed, and split before tanning begins. From there they move into a tanning yard containing 72 vats filled with a proprietary tanning liquor that includes natural extracts from mimosa and quebracho. The hides spend approximately two weeks in the tanning solution.
After tanning, the leather moves through a series of processes that determine its eventual thickness, color, feel, and finish. Large rotating drums are used for dyeing and conditioning. Oils and waxes are worked into the leather, while products such as Wickett & Craig's English Bridle and Harness leathers receive additional treatment with waxes and tallows.
Eventually the hides are stretched across large perforated screens and moved into a climate-controlled drying area. After several days of drying, they continue through finishing and grading before leaving the tannery.
Understanding the basic process helps explain the photographs, but what interested me most wasn't the individual sequence of steps. It was seeing how much physical work still exists inside an operation producing leather at this scale.
A brief pause in the work, surrounded by leather and processing machinery.
The People Behind the Process
Machines do a lot of the heavy work at Wickett & Craig, but the tannery doesn't feel automated.
Workers are constantly handling the material, moving hides, operating equipment, checking leather, guiding it through machines, and preparing it for whatever happens next. Even with the size of the facility and machinery, there is a very human rhythm to the place.
That's something I've always been drawn to photograph.
People who have done the same kind of work for years develop an efficiency that is difficult to fake. Movements become automatic. They know how a piece of material should behave and recognize when something isn't right. That kind of physical knowledge is visible even when you don't fully understand the job yourself.
Photographing people who are actually working also changes my role as a photographer. There is very little reason for me to direct anything. I can watch, learn the rhythm of what is happening, and try to anticipate where the next photograph might be.
The goal isn't to make the tannery look cleaner, prettier, or more dramatic than it is. The worn machinery, wet floors, stained walls, work clothes, hanging hides, and odd industrial light are all part of the place. Removing those things would remove much of what makes it worth photographing.
Handling a hide this size takes two people.
Conveyors, hanging hides, and machinery fill this section of the production floor.
A Tannery With More Than 150 Years of History
Wickett & Craig began making leather in Toronto in 1867 and remained there for more than a century. When the company relocated around 1990, it moved to Curwensville, a small Pennsylvania town in a region with its own long history of tanning and leather production.
Today, the company occupies a facility covering more than 16 acres. Although the machinery and production requirements have evolved over the years, Wickett & Craig continues to specialize in vegetable tanning at a time when much of the world's leather is produced using faster methods.
There is something compelling about seeing an old process continuing at a meaningful industrial scale. This isn't a demonstration of how leather used to be made or a historic workshop preserved for visitors. People are coming to work every day and producing leather that will be shipped to manufacturers and craftspeople around the world.
The history is interesting, but the fact that the work is still happening is what matters.
Photographing People at Work
The photographs from Wickett & Craig also fit into a much broader subject I've returned to throughout my career: people at work.
I've photographed inside barbershops across all 50 states, on cattle ranches throughout the American West, and in workshops, factories, and other places where people make things or work with their hands. The occupations are different, but many of the things that attract me to them are the same.
Working environments develop their own visual language. Tools end up in particular places because that's where they're needed. Buildings change around the work being done inside them. Clothing gets stained and machinery gets worn in predictable places. The environment gradually becomes a record of the work itself.
The people change too. Someone who has performed a task thousands of times moves differently from someone doing it for the first time. Those small gestures and routines often make better photographs than anything I could have staged.
That's why I'm generally most comfortable photographing people while they're actually doing something. Once the work starts, my presence becomes less important. The person I'm photographing has something else to concentrate on, which allows the photographs to become less about the camera and more about what is actually happening.
Pipes, barrels, work tables, and leather give the production floor its distinctly industrial character.
Moving hides from one part of the tannery to another is part of the daily work.
From the Tannery to the Cowboy
My interest in Wickett & Craig also connects naturally to my ongoing Cowboy Photography project.
Leather is one of the fundamental materials of cowboy culture, although it's easy to overlook because it is so commonplace. A working cowboy may spend much of the day surrounded by it without ever thinking of leather as a material in the abstract. It has already become a saddle, reins, a bridle, boots, chaps, or a belt. It's equipment.
The leather I've photographed on ranches also tends to be at the opposite end of its life from what I saw at Wickett & Craig. Saddles have been shaped by years on horseback, reins darkened by hands, sweat, and weather, and boots scratched and covered in dust. Good leather records its use, which is part of what makes old cowboy gear so visually interesting.
At Wickett & Craig, I was seeing the material before any of that happened. Before a saddlemaker or leatherworker turned it into something useful, and long before years of work gave it the character I'm accustomed to photographing.
Some of the heavier leather produced at Wickett & Craig ultimately becomes saddles, bridles, straps, and other equestrian equipment. That creates a direct line between a tannery in a small Pennsylvania town and the ranches I've photographed thousands of miles away in the West.
Near the end of the process, leather passes through one of the tannery's finishing machines.
A brief pause after a long day of work, surrounded by leather and equipment.
A portrait between the carts of leather and large drums on the tannery floor.
The Work Before the Work
One of the things I like about photographing manufacturing is that it exposes parts of everyday objects that are normally invisible.
When you look at a well-made saddle, it's natural to think about the saddlemaker. You see the stitching, tooling, construction, and design and understand that someone had to know how to make it. What is much easier to forget is that the craftsman began with a material somebody else had already spent weeks making.
The same is true of boots, belts, bridles, and countless other leather goods.
By the time those objects reach the people who use them, the tannery has disappeared from the story. There is no obvious evidence of the vats, drums, drying racks, machinery, or workers in Pennsylvania who handled the leather long before it became a finished object.
That's part of what made Wickett & Craig worth photographing.
My Cowboy project is largely about documenting a working culture that still exists despite the tendency to talk about the American West in the past tense. The same idea applies here. Wickett & Craig isn't interesting simply because the company was founded in 1867 or because vegetable tanning is an old process.
It's interesting because people are still doing the work.
A hide comes into the tannery. Over the next several weeks, people and machines transform it into leather. That leather leaves Pennsylvania and becomes something else in somebody else's hands. Eventually, some of it will wind up on a horse or a ranch, where another kind of work begins.
The tannery and the cowboy might seem like two completely different subjects.
For me, they're connected by the same thing: the work.
Years of use show up in the tools and equipment around the tannery.
The work continues around the large processing machines inside the tannery.
Stacks of leather wait alongside the machinery and work areas throughout the facility.
