Bridging the Broomielaw, Glasgow c. 1920s

This is "Bridging the Broomielaw, Glasgow" by W. Douglas MacLeod, and it's an etching, so made with acid on a metal plate, which is then printed. Look at the way the lines swarm, like the tide coming in, not really descriptive but evocative of the way light refracts on the surface of water. MacLeod really gets into the nitty gritty of the bridge construction. All those struts and supports are like a formal exercise, a dense network of lines. I like how this becomes an almost abstract pattern, right up against the more solid forms of the buildings behind. The whole image shimmers with the reflections of the water, the hard geometry of the bridge offset by the softness of the scene. It makes me think of Whistler or maybe some of the Ashcan School guys. But it’s very much its own thing, this image of a city in flux, caught between industry and the ever-changing flow of the river.