A New England lament: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand in the 1940s

Like Sheeler, Strand roamed through New England in the mid-1940s and cast his eyes on defunct textile mills. Time in New England contains a generous number of Strand's black-and-white photographs, including two of textile mills (Figs. 11, 12) taken during trips through the region between 1944 and 1946. Strand's interest in decaying vernacular architecture went beyond just textile mills to encompass houses, barns, meetinghouses, and churches. Joining these abandoned and neglected edifices are gravestones from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, weathered individuals, and both panoramic and detailed views of nature. Divided into four historical sections organized chronologically, the narrative progresses sequentially from the arrival of European colonists in the seventeenth century to the end of World War II. Time in New England chronicles a regional past while also underscoring the passing of things, people, and events over time.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

In coping with loss, Time in New England expresses a state of mourning rather than melancholia. According to Freud, in mourning the libido painfully yet steadily detaches itself from the lost object in such a way as to reach closure and resolution about the past. (36) To the extent that mourning is about coming to terms with loss by locating the absent object in the past, then mourning in Time in New England is a multitemporal experience. Time takes three different forms in Time in New England, each of which attempts to settle with loss. First, Time in New England develops chronologically to produce a historical past, which accepts loss. Second, time stands still to posit a past that is always also New England's present, which is to say that all is not lost. Finally, time looks forward to anticipate a future when New England will have been irretrievably lost in the past.

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

In designing their book Strand and Newhall chose artifacts surviving from the past and propelled them back in time. Within the book's chronology, most of the textual excerpts, buildings, and artifacts occupy the historical period in which they originated. For instance, to pay tribute to New England's whaling industry in the nineteenth century, the third section of the book includes a passage from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or The Whale of 1851 in which the Pequod chases the sperm whale over the swells of the sea. Melville's descriptive rhapsody joins a medley of other period texts about whaling, such as a sea chantey, a memoir about a shipwreck, and a chart listing the fifteen clipper ships built in New England between 1850 and 1854, together with documentation of some of the voyages in which they set records of speed and distance. This section, the longest in the book, recalls New England's economic might on land as well as at sea. Strand's photographs of mills find their proper historical place in this segment to commemorate a moment in time when the textile industry flourished to fuel the region's economy.