Steam Shovel at Work in Culebra Cut 1912

Joseph Pennell made this print, called "Steam Shovel at Work in Culebra Cut," with ink on paper, and you can see how the ink seems to swarm like gnats, or maybe flies around a carcass. The whole thing is an excavation site, a construction zone, and the artist had to figure out how to make a picture of that! You see him struggling with the sky – unsure how to turn the atmosphere into marks on paper, but really sure about the steam shovel itself. I imagine him thinking, how can I make this damn steam shovel look and feel like the real thing? There’s a dark looming quality and the tracks disappear into the distance. You can almost feel the air of hard work, and the dust in your teeth. It’s like he's saying that we’re making something huge here, a literal cut in the earth. He's asking us, what does it mean to change the world like that?