I began to understand my grandmother's expression, because yes, this really seemed like a Charles Dickens kind of a place. After I finished art school, I had a job in an old photo engraving shop in Boston as a plate etcher—dirty and dangerous work. Tanks of nitric acid to etch the plates lined the wall; an open flame to bake the coated metal printing plates; and an intensely bright carbon arc lamp to expose images onto the plates afterward. Literally a sweatshop, with temperatures sometimes up to 100 degrees.
As a student of printmaking, I was eager to learn this process. Wearing a long rubber apron, I began each day by coating those metal plates with a syrupy photographic fluid over a sink encrusted with a century's worth of blackened chemicals.
After a while, the dismal working conditions really got to me. At the end of each day, I found myself earnestly yearning to see more of God's beauty, and I held on to this passage in Science and Health: "As mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, which before were invisible, will become visible" (p. 264).
