Reflections on Faces From an American Dream, A Documentary Photographic Exhibition Concerning De-industrialisation in Late Twentieth Century America

Abstract

In 1989, I started photographing post-industrial cities and towns in Pennsylvania because by then its two major cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, after massive layoffs and plant closings, were largely responsible for the coining of the word deindustrialization. Pittsburgh's Monongahela Valley was renowned for thirty miles of steel mills and Philadelphia was formerly cited as the "workshop of the world," it being once the most industrialized city in North America. With its nineteenth century industries of textiles, lumber, leather, and coal hauled across the country on the famous Pennsylvania and Reading railroads, and its twentieth century heavy industries such as United States Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Portland Cement, Sun Shipbuilding and Mack Trucks, the state had become one of the most industrialized, unionized, and politically Democratic in America.