Collections
Harbor Works supports a growing collection of vintage documentary photographs that will engage anyone sympathetic to the economic, social and cultural nature of place. Visitors captivated by the coast of Maine will appreciate the waterfront images in Living the Fishing, a contemporary series on display in the Captain’s Room. Environmental and industrial historians will be fascinated by the working landscapes and occupational scenes in Foundations of Industry, from which the Gallery organizes occasional exhibits like The Thread of Time, a photographic remembrance of mill workers seventy-five years after the General Textile Strike. Americana enthusiasts will value the intimate character studies and richly-detailed settings in American Portraits, from Joe Schwartz’s Sullivan Midgets—a gang of Italian youth in 1930’s Greenwich Village—to Guy Saldanha’s Shotgun and Brownie, a disabled coal miner in 1980’s Harlan County. Local educators who specialize in geography and American history will welcome portraits that are powerful characterizations of the landscape, while writers and artists of many genres will be grateful for pictures that suggest ideas for future creative work.
Among the most unusual collections of Harbor Works are real photo postcards from 1906-1918, the inaugural period of mass picture communication facilitated by the folding pocket camera, whose vernacular images influenced a young generation of photographers like Walker Evans. Rare views of America at work, captured during a tumultuous period of invention, immigration and social unrest, document the scale and intensity of industrialization: Southern Plains oil derricks enveloping small farms, Hocking Valley beehive brick kilns belching smoke, and U.S.S. Texas battleship guns awaiting assembly on the Newport News dry docks. Portraits like harvest time in the Kansas wheat fields or Sunday morning in the Michigan lumber camps suggest the transition from an earlier generation of craft to mechanization and mass production. Landscapes of grain elevators, cotton gins and tobacco barns recall a quintessentially American architecture that has nearly disappeared. Included are images by some of the finest regional photographers, like J. V. Dedrick, who chronicled the white settlement of Oklahoma and its effect on Native Americans.
Conceived at a time of increasing pressure upon all natural resources and intense public debate over sustainability, Harbor Works is a learning place for anyone interested in the dialogue between nature and technology. From a steam-powered old growth timber mill in Oregon’s coastal range to the cavernous Lehigh Valley steel works that transformed the construction industry, various photographs in the collections reflect an America that will challenge one’s view of the landscape and seascape. Occasional exhibits on mining, logging and quarrying document the human and environmental cost of Western abundance and convenience, yet also the complexity of an economy in which our food, clothing and housing originate in conditions beyond our comprehension. Portraits from some of the oldest industrial places—company towns that remain dependent upon a single resource—may convey bleakness and toxicity, but also a community that is a powerful bond to the landscape: “I love the smell of lumber in summertime” reads a t-shirt worn by the young son of a Wisconsin paper mill worker.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that extols the primacy of information technology, Harbor Works invites visitors to see the physical labor that is the backbone of America. From roughnecks drilling in the Wyoming oil fields, where a sudden gas kick can produce 150-foot flames from the flare, to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s Topeka shops, where machinists, boilermakers and pipe fitters repair the locomotives that haul an endless parade of double-stack containers over the busiest piece of railroad in the world, various images reveal how today’s economy is deeply dependent upon human capacity. Despite labor-saving investments, one can see that no extent of mechanical engineering has replicated the nimble dexterity in a seamstress’s touch, the artful control in a lathe operator’s grip or the measured force in a quarryman’s swing. Nothing has reliably replaced the watchful care of a farmer tending his land, or the seasoned intuition of a fisherman laying his nets—the most ancient of trades.