Description
Miami is a new city. Henry Flagler’s first train arrived on 22 April 1896, and the city was incorporated on 28 July that year, with a little over three hundred inhabitants. Julia Tuttle, who owned land on the Miami River, had persuaded Flagler to bring his line there after the freezes of the winter of 1894–1895; she is still called “the Mother of Miami”. The landscape in the image is a construction too. Early in the twentieth century, the Government Cut channel was dug through the peninsula to open the port to the open sea; it cut off from Miami Beach the island that now bears the name of Carl Fisher, the resort’s developer, who bought it in 1919. Since the 1960s, the cruise and cargo port has spread over islands joined together in the middle of Biscayne Bay.
The photograph is taken at water level, at the moment the day tips over. The sky fills two thirds of the frame and is its true subject: great scarves of cloud coil across it, set alight by the vanished sun, while on the right a storm mass, almost blue with shadow, advances like a curtain. On the horizon, the downtown towers, the first lights and the port’s cranes are reduced to silhouettes. The water, already taken by the night, keeps only a long copper reflection in the foreground.
In 1860, with Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederic Edwin Church painted a whole sky on fire above an already darkened land. The wilderness has given way to a city, but the division remains the same: the light at the very top, and the shadow gaining ground. The Water series follows the waters that made cities; here, a port won from the bay.
