Nov. 25, 1912 A

Nov. 25, 1912 A

Pawtucket, R.I. Looking down Blackstone River from Exchange Street Bridge

Notes: At first glance it might appear to be the filmy strangeness on the surface of the river that accounts for the dark lure of this image. Is this mist? Or some kind of water-borne Spanish moss? It looks as if cobwebs have been spilled out of the factory and covered the surroundings. One half of the image is nostalgic; pictured from a distance; pastoral. Both banks of the river are tree-lined. At the focal point, a steeple, suggesting the pre-eminence of God. But at the left, the strikingly clean contrast of the bright red brick factory: “Lebanon Mill Co. Knit Goods.” It is only when the card 180 degrees did I realize that the incomplete hand-tinting left the reflected images as ghostly negatives of the ones above water. But the sky itself… above and below, was a perfectly mirrored blue. Intentional? Not certain, but it seems unlikely. We’ve seen other examples of the unwillingness to finish the exacting and tedious work of hand-coloring the black and white photographs. But this unintended effect of the photographic art has a real world counterpart in the dark currents of the machine age, the industrial waste that would pollute rivers like the Blackstone, and saturate the air with the particulates streaming from the smokestacks that vie with the steeples for the highest reach on the ladder to Heaven. It may seem as if this card, and the one previous, are out of chronological order. The earlier one is addressed to Olney at the Madaquet L.S.S. This one asks if he got the job. Maybe he got a temporary appointment to begin.

The Hugh C. Leighton Co., Manufacturers, Portland, Me. U.S.A.