Otto Coke and Coal Hoist 1914

Elisha Kent Kane Wetherill made this plate of an Otto Coke and Coal Hoist. I can imagine his focus, the careful application of acid, of resisting and revealing in equal measure. The marks in the image, from the criss-crossed girders of the hoist to the figures in the foreground, are like a map of the artist’s eye and hand. Look at how those lines create an image that feels both solid and ghostly. The hoist seems to emerge from the fog like a memory. I wonder if Wetherill felt like he was capturing something that was already disappearing? There’s a dialogue happening here with other artists who were painting and etching the industrial landscape, like Joseph Pennell. They're all working in a space between realism and something more dreamlike. It’s like they’re asking, what does it mean to live in a world that’s increasingly built of steel and smoke? Artists are always talking to each other, you know, across time, across images, across gestures.