Joseph Pennell's pictures of the Panama Canal Reproductions of a series of lithographs made by him on the Isthmus of Panama, January—March 1912, together with impressions — Text and Context

Movement Between Ruin and Order

Pennell structures his journey as a series of visual discoveries, beginning with the French failure. At Mount Hope swamp he finds "locomotives, dredges, lock-gates, huge bulks of iron, great wheels, nameless, shapeless masses—half under water, half covered with vines." This is the opening note, a graveyard of machinery. From there he moves to the American town of Colon, where every house is "Japanese in feeling, French or American in construction, screened with black wire gauze, divided by white wood lines." The juxtaposition is deliberate: the old work swallowed by jungle, the new work ordered and screened. Later, at Gatun Dam, he notes that vegetation has been used to bind the dam's surface, so that "I could not tell Nature's work from that of the engineers." The boundary between human construction and natural growth blurs repeatedly in his descriptions.

Recurring Visual Motifs: Trees, Mountains, and Levels

Certain images recur across the lithographs and notes. The "strange-shaped mountains and strange-shaped trees" appear in the native village scene, where a white tree with no bark "puts out leaves" in summer. Pennell's eye is drawn to the exotic and the decorative—the cathedral tower "covered with a shimmering, glittering mosaic of pearl oyster shells"—but also to the engineered landscape's geometry. In the cut at Bas Obispo he describes "the various levels on which the excavations are made" and the dirt trains "one above the other." At Las Cascadas he again notes "the different levels on which the work is carried out." This vertical stacking, both natural and man-made, becomes a compositional principle: the lithographs likely echo this layering of terraces, tracks, and hillsides.

The Artist's Selective Gaze

Pennell is candid about his priorities. He writes, "I was after picturesqueness." This means he passes over the clubs, social centres, churches, art galleries, and museums on the Isthmus—"I never saw them." He also declines to investigate sanitary conditions or social evils. Yet his notes inadvertently record the Zone's racial and economic divisions: the separate dining and sleeping places for "silver employees" (foreigners) and for negroes, even on workmen's trains. He observes that the Indian "has the sense and pride to live his own life down there, apart, as at home in India." These asides are not developed into commentary; they remain observations, like the shape of a tree or the sheen of oyster shells. The reader is left to weigh what Pennell chose to frame against what he left outside the picture.

The Unfinished Work and the Artist's Timing

Pennell's fear that he had come too late—that the canal would be finished and "nothing to see"—runs through the introduction. He arrived to find locks built and gates partly in place, but also slides, ongoing excavation, and the French debris. At Culebra, the deepest cut at the continental divide, he records that the French did their greatest work, and the United States has placed a plaque "high up on the left-hand bare mountain face of Gold Hill." The slides "move slowly, not like avalanches, but have caused endless complications." Colonel Gaillard, the engineer, "believes he will triumph over all his difficulties—which include even a small volcano." The canal is still becoming; Pennell's lithographs freeze a moment when the landscape is actively being reshaped, and the artist's own medium—lithography, a process of drawing on stone—mirrors the engineers' carving of rock.

Pennell's notes are best read as a companion to the plates, not as a comprehensive history. He assumes the reader will look at the images and supplies only what a draftsman would notice: the angle of a cut, the texture of a hillside, the way light falls on a corrugated roof. For those interested in the canal's construction, the text offers incidental detail; for those interested in how an artist sees a vast engineering project, it is a deliberate record of selection and omission. The lithographs themselves are not reproduced here, but the descriptions give a clear sense of their subjects and composition.

There’s something about Pennell’s Panama—the way he caught raw machinery against that heavy green—that makes me think of paper itself, the quiet stuff those prints rest on. I found myself reaching for A Text-book of Paper-making — A Reader’s Guide afterward, just to understand the surface holding all that heat. Old trades, patient hands. It felt like closing a loop I hadn’t known was open.