Empty Empires occupies a distinct conceptual position within Echoes, Still, shifting the project’s attention from industrial structures that remain to the landscapes in which they have disappeared. Where Echoes, Still encounters surviving mills and factories as physical repositories of memory, Empty Empires considers absence as another form of presence. The portfolio examines sites where Maine’s industrial architecture has been destroyed, demolished, repurposed, or subsumed by new economies and civic uses—becoming schools, parks, public waterfronts, commercial districts, and contemporary industrial facilities. Rather than reconstructing these vanished places as historical artifacts, the work engages the present landscape as a palimpsest, where layers of labor, ambition, loss, and reinvention remain embedded even when the original structures are no longer visible.
The portfolio is grounded in the idea of industrial afterlife: the capacity of a place to retain meaning after its original purpose has disappeared. Camden’s former W. G. Alden Camden Iron Works, established around 1886 at the harbor head of Camden Bay along Commercial and Bayview Streets, exemplifies this process of continual transformation. Once part of Camden’s industrial waterfront, the site was later occupied by the Camden Sardine Company beginning in 1928 before being completely destroyed by fire. By 1935, the property had become Camden Public Landing and has since evolved into a contemporary tourist landscape of shops, restaurants, and parking. The present-day site offers little immediate evidence of the industries that once defined it, yet its transformation embodies the central tension of Empty Empires: the physical disappearance of industry does not necessarily erase its cultural or spatial imprint.
A parallel history unfolds at the former State Street industrial site in Ellsworth. Around 1888, Burrell, Houghton & Company constructed Ellsworth’s first modern shoe factory—a substantial three-story, 200-by-50-foot wooden building powered by a 50-horsepower steam engine. The arrival of B.E. Cole & Company began the next chapter of the factory’s history. Under Cole, the building became more firmly established in local memory and continued as one of Ellsworth’s important workplaces. Around 1907, the site entered a second industrial life when the Ellsworth Hardwood Company took occupancy, continuing there until 1957, when a fire destroyed the factory and brought the site’s industrial era to a close. The property was subsequently transformed into Knowlton Elementary School, which operated from 1961 to 2008, and later became Knowlton Park, a public recreational space for the surrounding neighborhood. Today, playground equipment, open space, landscaping, and community activity occupy a location once characterized by machinery, production, and industrial labor. The contrast is central to the portfolio: the contemporary landscape appears ordinary and familiar, yet beneath it lies a succession of industrial histories that have largely disappeared from view.
Within Echoes, Still, Empty Empires functions as a meditation on absence, erasure, transformation, and the persistence of place. It extends the project beyond the tangible remnants of brick, timber, steel, machinery, and worn surfaces to consider what happens when those physical witnesses are removed. The portfolio does not seek to mourn a vanished industrial past or restore these places to an imagined former state; instead, it asks how memory operates when the evidence of memory has itself been transformed. Together, Echoes, Still and Empty Empires establish a dialogue between presence and absence, remnant and replacement, material memory and spatial memory—revealing Maine’s industrial landscape as neither fixed nor concluded, but continually rewritten by time, human intervention, and the evolving needs of its communities..
Empty Empires Portfolio
Knowlton Park 401–409 State Street Ellsworth, Hancock County, Maine
From the Echoes, Still: Maine's Industrial Remnants Collection (2024–2028)
Empty Empires Portfolio
Historical Narrative
Industrial Heritage of Ellsworth, Volume I: Burrell, Houghton & Company Boot & Shoe Factory, c. 1888
Kevin LeDuc Pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta Edition of 5 + 1 Artist's Proof (Portfolio of 40 Images)
Paper Size: 40 × 55 inches Image Size: 31.33 × 37 inches Borders: Approximately 4 inches (All Sides)