Inside one of America's latest pencil factories

The pencil is no different from a magic wand: a small piece of wood that tracks the smallest movements of your hand as it moves along the surface of a sheet of paper. I use it right now, drawing them little strange loops and dashes to make these words. As a tool, the pencil is very sensitive. The lines that he draws may be thick or unnoticeable, like shouting or whispering, a concrete block or a sheet of grass, and all depending on a change in pressure so elusive that in any other context we would not notice it. (With the applied efforts, you cannot knock together a domino knuckle.) And although the pencil is complex enough to track every movement of a human hand, it is at the same time so simple that it is accessible to any child.

Radical simplicity is difficult to manufacture. Since 1889, the General Pencil company has turned huge amounts of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar tablets, graphite) into products that you can find in all of America’s art and stationery stores: watercolor pencils, drawing coal, pastel chalks. When other plants moved overseas, the General Pencil stayed at home, producing a thousand tools in the middle of Jersey City.


Waste from the production of graphite rods is collected for recycling.

Over the past couple of years, photographer Christopher Payne visited the factory dozens of times, documenting in detail each phase of the production process. His photos captured many different worlds hidden behind a simple brick exterior of the complex. The basement, where the workers process the charcoal, is the universe of absolute gray: gray shirts, gray hands, gray machines, absorbing gray ingredients. Surprisingly a lot of handwork; some workers have to wash their palms for several days. Rods of pencils crawl out of the car, like soft and wet macaroni, ready to be cut to different lengths and dried, before getting into their wooden shells.


Graphite sand is used to evenly distribute the heat when baking the slate. It is then poured out and recycled.


Future leads are cooled before dipping in heated wax.


These graphite rods are heated in a furnace where the material loses excess moisture and hardens.

Other parts of the factory are filled with color. The red pencils are lined up in neat rows, waiting for them to be dipped in bright blue paint. A worker named Maria selects the colors of her shirt and nail polish under the shade of pastel rods that are produced this week. White crayons, one of the company's branded products, are made in a special machine, where they are separated from the rest of the colors. In a car with tips, a whirlpool of pink erasers is wrapped up under the supervision of a woman with a bindi on her forehead.


Pastel cores are very fragile, so they are manually laid on cedar planks.


The worker in the picture worked at the General Pencil factory for 47 years. Pastel and coal are processed in a mixer behind his back.


Pastel rods, which are used in the production of colored pencils, are laid out manually in the grooves on wooden planks. There they dry before getting into the blank for pencils. The extruder on which they were squeezed out, usually works with one color during the week. Then the machine is thoroughly cleaned and loaded with a different color material.


Laying machine inserts graphite rods on pre-coated with preform


The second layer of wood completely covers the pencil lead. The resulting “sandwich” is compressed so that it dries and glues well together.


The sandwich still needs to be shaped. The milling machine saws the planks into individual pencils of the desired shape: round, hex, or any other


Editing pencils are sharpened on both sides: one leaves red marks, the other blue. Coasters with pencils, which you see, will soon be turned over and dipped in blue paint


The clips are metal rings that hold the eraser in place. They are loaded into a conveyor belt and sent to a machine that puts them on the ends of pencils.


The machine equips pencils with erasers and clips.


After the first layer of coating pencils go to the conveyor for the second layer. Most paint four times in a row


Some pencils put on smooth steel tips without erasers.

Payne conveys the beauty of factory cars: the strange architecture of chains, conveyor belts, cans of glue, metal discs and gears coated with oil. The photographer captured how strange it was to see a simple tool like a pencil broken into even simpler components. He also shows aesthetic scale magic. Piles of rods await their turn around the concrete wall, like an arsenal of gray spaghetti. Hundreds of pencils are stacked in hexagonal towers. Sawdust flies when new pencils are pulled through the wheel of a rapidly rotating emery paper of a “sharpener” machine.

In the era of endless screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionary straightforward: the pencil rejects digital jujitsu. It is perfect analog, it is distinguished by its absolute presence. Pencil helps us escape from oblivion. Think how many of your small movements disappear unnoticed. Blinking eyes, twitching fingers and secret looks - they all disappear into nowhere. But when you hold a pencil, your quiet little hand dance is faithfully reproduced, each loop and each dash, all to the very last point at the end of the sentence. Photos like these do something similar. They preserve the secret origin of everyday, familiar objects. They show us the people who make these objects, as well as the old production, which disappears in favor of automation. Like a pencil, these photos sketch all the movements that will disappear one day.