[Alice Volpitta] My name is Alice Volpitta. To me, this is showing fishermen out on a body of water coming in with their catch. And it made me start thinking about my role as Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper and the Waterkeeper Movement in general, and where its roots are, and that's from fishermen who couldn't fish anymore because there was too much pollution in the water. The facial expression of the fisherman in the forefront is telling me that they haven't had a good day of fishing, and it's telling me that there's something going on that's preventing him from bringing the catch home for that day, from providing for his family. The juxtaposition of the buildings being right on the water: There's no separation between the human and the environmental elements here. And so knowing what I know about this time period, there are different types of industrial activities happening right next to the river; people throwing their waste out the window, directly into that river. There's no mitigation. It's just people and the environment clashing. All of these buildings that are sort of crooked and packed in tightly together reminds me of the Fells Point neighborhood in Baltimore. It makes me think about the ways that we utilize our Baltimore Harbor even today. Sure, in the past, it was always used as an industrial center of commerce. It was used for basically discharging pollution into it. It was used as a waste ground. And so for me, this picture is really similar to that. It's seeing buildings that we see every single day, but from physically and maybe even metaphorically from a new angle.

This nearly six-inch-high and approximately nine-inch-wide etching is printed in black ink on white paper. It depicts a wharf on the River Thames in London, England, filled with boats of varying sizes, some with passengers, surrounded by a dense array of old-looking buildings that butt directly up against the waterway. The urban and natural landscapes collide to create the feeling of a busy and crowded central wharf area. In the foreground, a figure, possibly a dock worker, sits in a boat with his left arm propped up on the boat’s edge. He stares off into the distance toward the right of the image. He wears a rumpled, open jacket and a soft fabric cap.