The Dream Pool.

Photographs by Christine Rogers.

Self Published, Nashville, 2024. 176 pp., 67 images,

SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE!

The Dream Pool is a book comprised of 15 years of photographic work and archival newspaper texts from 1833-1835 that are intertwined with a personal narrative. The images were made in three countries - Switzerland, the United States and India. The content and story line span two centuries, while the personal narrative spans several generations.

In 1833, ice was harvested from Walden Pond and a few other ponds in New England, placed on a ship called the Tuscany, and sent to Calcutta by ice entrepreneur Frederic Tudor. Upon departure, there were 400,000 pounds of ice on the ship; when it arrived in Calcutta, September of 1833, roughly half that remained. No one in Calcutta had ever seen anything like it. Calcuttans wrote poems about the ice to the local newspaper: poems about relief to the feeling of their brains on fire and of cold wine and ice cream. Some, upon touching the ice, felt like their hands were burning and ran.
In June of 2014, I first went to Calcutta to search for mentions of the ice trade in the National Library newspaper archives and to photograph blocks of ice melting outside of the oldest ice factory in India.
In Nashville, one hot summer day in 2016, my mother, who I had always been close with, suddenly ended our relationship by email under mysterious circumstances, turning my life and my work about the ice trade on its head.
The Dream Pool weaves the poetic memory of the almost-evaporated history that was once the Indo-American Ice Trade of 1833 with the present day of my family’s story, beginning with an enduring rupture over the departure from their idealized Swiss homeland and the ultimate dissolution of a family. Finding connections between global and regional aspirations, personal narrative, and within the relevant context of an ever-warming planet, I am resuscitating memories that highlight the optimism and limits of photographic seeing. It feels a bit like going out into the sun with a sunburn.
What results is a nested braided narrative about melting ice, pictures both seen and unseen, lost and imagined homelands, disappearing mothers and the fading dream of motherhood.

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