Post-War Bride

War Bride

I have always been intrigued by the old industrial aesthetic, which is part of the reason why I was drawn to Clarence Holbrook Carter's War Bride. Though I spent a long time observing the works of art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, this painting in a more dimly lit back corner of the gallery stuck out to me. In it, a young woman stands in a white dress and wedding veil in front of a vast open space resembling something of a factory floor. In the background, a red glow highlights the spectral figure against the cool lifeless grey of the series of machines in the background. 

Experience and Response

Immediately, a few things stuck out to me. First was the implication of innocence from the white halo-like veil and flower crown. At the same time, the figure itself appears ghost-like, unmoving, and quiet. Beyond the figure, a red glow arrises from the background, though its origin is blocked by the spectral figure. "Hellfire" is the word that came to mind while looking at this red glow against the blackness.

Using one-point perspective with a central vanishing point, the artist seems to draw a connection between the repetition of the mechanical parts with the arrangement of pews in a church. With the juxtaposition of religious imagery with the machine-age factory floor, the painting to me has an overwhelming sense of loneliness and frailness. 

Intended Meaning

While I saw in this image a duality between religious imagery and machinery, when I read the information plaque after making my own observations, I saw that the painting in its time was meant to speak to "anxiety and loneliness" of the decade before the impending destruction of WWII. Painted by a Carnegie Tech art professor, what I find extremely compelling about this painting is that it was inspired by a dream the artist had after going to a Pittsburgh steel mill. 

Post-War Bride

Because Clarence Holbrook Carter's War Bride is about a steel mill in Pittsburgh, I wanted to depict this image using photos from abandoned Pittsburgh industrial mills in an attempt to highlight the loneliness and anxiety of the original painting and translate it through a modern post-industial lens. Though the original image depicts shiny, functional systems, I wanted to re-imagination Carter's industrial landscape as defunct machinery in order to depict the kinds of destruction and abandonment left in the post-WWII world while still retaining the sense of loneliness, anxiety, purity, and mystery of the original. 

Sourcing and Process

Urban Exploration is the modern hobby of exploring predominantly abandoned man-made structures to document, photograph, or experience a place and its history. In places like Pittsburgh with rich industrial histories, many old steel plants, factories, and even churches remain abandoned and decaying. Though many of these decaying structures around us have been forgotten, urban explorers continue to document and experience the shells of Pittsburgh's industrial history.

The Urban Exploration Resource (UER) is the largest and most used website for documenting these photos and experiences. Using this database of abandonments, I chose 8 images of places in Pittsburgh which included a church, a train, and a steel mill. I then created a collage by placing them all on a Photoshop document. After playing around with occupancy, changing colors, and erasing parts so it all fit together, I added a image of a vintage veil before putting a final "dry brush" filter on it. 

Reflection

While I think my image accurately highlights the sense of human frailty in this man vs. machine narrative, I think the sourcing of images from a database of abandoned sites dials up the creepiness factor to a degree that was not as present in the original. Instead of being a direct translation of the experience I had with this painting, I think the one I created is sort of an extreme modernized version. 

To do this differently, I would have done a little more research on the painter and maybe tried to create the sense of the painting on my own, instead of sourcing images from other places. While I personally am happy with the result, I think my image adds a lot of complexity that wasn't there in the original.