Dreamland by Michael Lesy

“What we now know to be true we have learned only because of the passage of time: the arrow of progress that these people—our ancestors—shot into the air has landed in our backs. The moment when these pictures were made was like the instant—strangely painless—after a deep clean, knife wound. All the underground treasures—the oil, the ore, the coal, and the stone—were being dug up from the earth, and all the toxins we now live with were being let loose.

“Detroit Publishing sold images of affirmation. Our ancestors bought, sent, and kept them as testaments and reminders. “We were here; it was remarkable, see what we saw.” One hundred years later, we see things differently. We think their pictures are proud, handsome, and beautiful, but we also understand that inside every image of power and certainly was not just diminution and decay, but the very cause of that decay: a copper smelter in Michigan, built in a pastures, cows in the foreground, a brick chimney, behind black smoke billowing into a clear sky. "‘Stop!’ we want to say. ‘Wait!’ we want to say. But our ancestors didn’t stop, and because they didn’t, we exist as we do today.

“We can respond to the images in a variety of ways, seeing them as foolish, as naive, even as tragic. Or we can understand them as images of possibility, not as models to reconstruct what was, but as reminders of a state of hope—that, knowing all we know, we might, in some fashion, be able to make the world seem whole again.”

—Michael Lesy, 1997