Passing Secrets:
A Year on the River's Edge

Photographs by
Madeline Drexler

About the Project:

            From May 2006 to May 2007, I photographed along a short stretch of the Charles River, in Watertown, on the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation’s overgrown nature trail. During this period, workmen began disassembling the interior of an abandoned factory on the path, and allowed me access to the building: a gutted cathedral of rusty steel beams, ripped sheetrock, shattered glass, abandoned machinery, invading vines, and graffiti on every surface.

Between nature and human nature, benign neglect and dereliction, I had stumbled into a double visual paradise. Yet most of the poems and riddles I discovered were passing secrets: physically obscured, deliberately hidden from view or just beyond a walker’s line of sight.

 “Passing Secrets” consists of highly-detailed, color-saturated images – shot with Fujicolor Pro 400 H film and a Nikon 55-mm macro close-up lens – that are aesthetically formal and surprising in content. They depict sights unseen: mysteries, humor and ephemera on the river’s edge.  

About the Photographer:

I am a Boston-based journalist and author. My work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other national publications. While I currently make my living as a writer, I began my journalism career as a staff photographer for the Associated Press.

Contact Madeline Drexler at drexler@comcast.net