Prosperity
Victoria Pépin
→MFA PH 2027
Postcard of Pawtucket Falls, January 22, 1915
At Pawtucket Falls, the river keeps its own time. Long before the mills, it was a gathering and fishing site for Native communities. Later, in 1793, it powered the machines of early American industry at Slater Mill, a water-powered cotton spinning mill often named the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. The water has carried labor, ambition, waste, and dispossession. It has witnessed extraction and endurance. Yet it goes on flowing.
When I arrived in Providence in August, I began looking at the city through its images. The falls appeared repeatedly on early twentieth-century postcards, usually from the same vantage point. The waterfall descends without end. The postcards fix that descent and repeat it in series.
Victoria Pépin, Prosperity, September 15, 2025, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10”
But the symmetry ends there. The site holds centuries of history and transformation. The postcards hold a few hurried lines. Health. Weather. Arrival. I am unwell. I hope you are well. I just arrived. Minor proof of a passage in time.
On a card from 1915, the ink is blurred and the paper is water-stained, as if the falls had reached it after all. The postcards age. As I photographed the falls at night, they didn’t seem to age. They shimmer and endure, fresh, relentless, almost defiant in the white glare of their spray. How do we encounter time when it flows, quite literally, beneath us? I wonder what it means to inhabit a place that has witnessed so much more than we have.
Postcard of the Pawtucket River above the falls, September 3, 1906
Victoria Pépin looks at places where time does not pass at the same speed as we do.