Industrial Waterfront, Florida, 1940s-1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Industrial Waterfront, Florida, 1940s-1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Industrial Waterfront, Florida, 1940s-1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1940–1955

AA-2026-38DC29

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A phosphate or chemical plant sits across the water in the mid-distance, its stacks and rectangular processing buildings the kind of industrial infrastructure that transformed Florida's interior in the decades after World War II, when the state decided that economic growth trumped the appearance of its coastlines. Someone shot this from a shoreline thick with mangrove and sea grape—the kind of landscape that was still considered worthless swamp, good mainly as framing for whatever was being built across the channel. The saturated color film stock, with its unnaturally vivid blues, dates to the postwar era when Americans were using new Kodachrome and Ektachrome film to document their booming industrial economy as proof of national vigor. The composition itself reveals the photographer's unconscious priorities: the factory is centered and in sharp focus, while the native vegetation that would survive another few decades gets relegated to the edges of the frame. By the 1970s most of this wetland would be drained or filled, but in this moment it still borders the view, neither ugly enough to cut from the picture nor important enough to be the subject.

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