Echoes. Still

Maine's Industrial Remnants

Echoes, Still is an expansive photographic exploration of Maine’s industrial remnants, encompassing all sixteen counties through a contemporary, 21st-century lens. Organized into thematically focused portfolios, the project maps Maine’s industrial history—from its first cotton mill, Brunswick Cotton Manufacturing, circa 1809, through the rise and decline of its limestone giants, shoe and woolen factories, and paper industry—revealing how the remnants of industrial labor persist through architecture, texture, light, shadow, and decay within the landscape. Moving beyond the conventions of historical record or documentary practice, the work approaches abandoned mills and factories, quarries, and altered industrial sites as sites of spatial archives, memory, material presence, and transformation, where architecture and artifacts bare traces of labor, repetition, and human lives once embedded within them. Informed by the artist’s familial histories of industrial labor, Echoes, Still explores the tensions between presence and absence, preservation and erasure, abandonment and renewal, and memory and time, revealing Maine’s industrial terrain as a physical and psychological palimpsest that continues to shape place, memory, and belonging.

“I photograph these buildings because they feel inhabited, carrying a presence that lives beyond architecture and history. When I stand before them, I’m responding to memory—both inherited and sensed—visualizing what remains after the machines and the people have gone quiet. This work is inseparable from my family: my Canadian French grandfather, sipping a Ballentine Ale while smoking Pall Malls at the dining room table, counting piecework pay for every shoe he made, and my Irish grandmother of County Mayo crossing the Atlantic Ocean alone as a 12 year old child to toil her teens in the woolen mills of Boston and Worchester. Floor after floor of heavy timbers and iron, worn smooth by decades of motion, I seem to remember every machine that once shook their frame. By nature I’m a tactile person, guided by an inner voice that pulls me closer to places of danger, where I visualize seething motors still pressing through brick walls amid shattered glass, overgrown vegetation, and collapsing roofs, all whispering come closer. I smell the musk of rotting wood floors, and taste drooling mortar. I study the texture of each brick, and feel both the weight of a pane of Coke glass and the sharp shards of fallen windows cutting into my hands.”

-Kevin LeDuc

Autumn Within

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

It is autumn; not without,
  But within me is the cold.
Youth and spring are all about;
  It is I that have grown old. 

Birds are darting through the air,
  Singing, building without rest;
Life is stirring everywhere,
  Save within my lonely breast. 

There is silence: the dead leaves
  Fall and rustle and are still;
Beats no flail upon the sheaves
  Comes no murmur from the mill

In the Harbor: Ultima Thule - Part II

Published 1882

 Millworks by County

Androscoggin Aroostook Cumberland Franklin Hancock Kennebec Knox Lincoln Oxford Penobscot Piscataquis Sagadahoc Somerset Waldo Washington York

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© 2026 Kevin LeDuc