T. Luke Young’s images are deeply rooted in Lawrence’s history. His photographic research on abandoned mills documents, in an intimate and reflexive way, the economic and social history of the region. During the mid to late 19th century Lawrence developed as an industrial city where poor European immigrants worked, mainly in the textile industry. Factories became economic machinery, fed by the workers’ labor. Struggling in a new land, Lawrence laborers achieved a new nationality and the social rights they were deprived of in Europe; not without powerful strikes and labor struggles resulting in one of the first union movements in the United States. In the second half of the 20th century a new wave of immigrants arrived in Lawrence; Puerto Ricans and Dominicans were recruited to work in mills. Their situation differed from the earlier arrivals as they suffered the consequences of economic changes in the region, clashing against the dismantlement of factories and their transformation to such temporal uses as archives and storage warehouses. The images depict an economic and social life of stillness, but that may change if Lawrence becomes the site of advanced biomedical and high-tech industry. A new wave of economic investments is starting to transform cityscapes as the old mills are adapted for service and residential uses. But meanwhile Lawrence’s future is uncertain. T. Luke Young’s photographs are testimony to the anxiety and expectations of Lawrencians toward their future. The emptiness of the abandoned factories talks to us about their past, a story of anonymity, hard labor and abandonment. And at the same time, a story of beauty, an homage to the people, their memory and patrimony. The natural light that illuminates these gigantic rooms, filtered through the windows, is a metaphor of the city’s dreams, hopes and expectations, an uncertain presence that announces the future. In one photograph we are placed in a closed, decayed and humid space. Darkness surrounds us and sunlight, streaming down from a floor above connected by a spiral stairway shows us the only way out. We are locked in an industrial purgatory. But, is heaven or hell in front of us? Another image shows a blue plastic swimming pool lying on a factory floor. The surrealistic scene is explained as the pool was used to capture water from a leaking roof. Perhaps this picture is a metaphor of Lawrence, the immigrants’ dreams of a better life, clashing against a contradictory reality, navigating in difficulty through reality. In Young's images architecture serves as a vessel to communicate a social history, a document on an always-absent human life. Beyond the specificity of the social community he chose, the photographer is interested in universal themes, the passages of time, and our lapse of existence in life. Time and space, ordered in the structures of industrial architecture, are captured in a melancholic way. The "flashpoint" or the capability of the photographic medium to capture an instant serves to show the ambivalence between the eternal and the ephemeral. The raw beauty and ghostly spaces of Lawrence factories are mental scenes, visual platforms for our glimpses of eternity. Santiago Rueda |