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

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Arranged in a chronological narrative, all of the textual excerpts, buildings, objects, and people evoke former lives and historical events. At the same time, the chronology itself and the photographs of ruined artifacts always also attest to the pastness of that New England past; they do not allow the reader to forget the present in order to reinhabit the past, even momentarily. Toward this end, the photograph does double work: it both accepts a part within a story about the development of the past over time while recognizing that the thing that it commemorates no longer exists as it was in the past, and the people it pictures are dead or will soon die. Time in New England acknowledges and comes to terms with loss precisely by placing photographs of abandoned and antiquated objects, buildings, and even people in a chronological history.

Time in New England frames time in a second way: even as time moves forward from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, it seems to stand still. To the extent that the photographs project the present state of ruin onto the entirety of New England's past, they insist on a sense of loss that endures over time. Aged material artifacts shroud the harsh terrain over the entire span of time covered by Time in New England. Other objects interrupt the chronicle of the region's cultural development over time to suggest stasis by refusing to stay in their proper historical place. Old, chipped tombstones rise up in parts 1, 2, and 4, while Congregational churches from bygone eras grace all four historical periods. The panoramic expanses of land and sea as well as the magnified details of rock and foliage captured in Strand's photographs characterize a desolate regional topography under changing seasonal conditions. Yet even as the natural landscape undergoes cyclical change and serves as the stage for various historical dramas, it stays constant in appearance, constantly depopulated, constantly austere. The region persists in a permanent state of loss, its lives and accomplishments accessible only at a remove, through the recognition of loss.

The textual excerpts in Time in New England similarly emphasize an essential regional core that remained the same. In the introduction to the book Newhall announced that she sought in her selection of texts to feature individual voices that typified the region, that captured "the New England spirit," as she put it. This regional spirit apparently remained unchanged despite the passage of time, dramatic historical events, the life and death of people, and the decay of buildings and artifacts. Newhall's religious terminology implicitly uncovered a spirit that persisted even when the body aged, died, and rotted.