DREAMLAND: Photographs of America.<i> By Michael Lesy</i> .<i> The New Press: 208 pp., $40</i>

Walt, these photos were taken during the early years of a century you never saw, and if somehow you’d come upon them, you’d not have cared to live on into their time. You sang of the open road and of the joyous singing you heard there, the voices of mechanics, of carpenters, of boatmen and ploughboys and cutters of wood--a very chorale of America. But these black-and-whites, infinitely more fluent than color, tell of an America that sings other songs than the ones you heard. They tell of tollgates on the long brown path where once you drew great draughts of space. They say that the space now is occupied, that the rolling earth is fenced and the open road paved.

Don’t start from Paumanok, Walt. Stay on your fish-shaped isle, walk its dunes to Montauk and never look back--because if you do, you’ll grieve, for the voices you heard once are still. The cheerful voice of the road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road--they’re smothered by smoke and slag, they’re lashed down with rails and pipe and wire, and they can be bought for a song (another song!) on a street we call The Street. No path, brown or otherwise, remains untrodden, and your beloved camaradoes, Walt, your masons and hatters and makers of shoes, your sweet singers of melodious song--they’re puddlers now, they moil and mule in mines, they oil locomotives with 80-inch wheels. Stay in Paumanok, Walt. Leave, and what you’ll find is stone and steel where trees once stood, cities spreading like a skin disease, beaches buried under people, parks deep in straw hats, parasols and lunch. Don’t hunt for what isn’t there, Walt: The age you knew is over, and your free-as-air camaradoes are slaving for a wage.

These photos show your nation of individuals entering the collective of industry and commerce, a transition you were spared the pain of seeing. Unknown to you our Parthenon banks and depot cathedrals, you’re unaware of wonders like the ballpoint pen, and not as yet does E=mc2. Only from afar can you see the hundred-room hovels of the rich, their finery, their mannerly pursuits through summers that last all year. Yours is the simple world, Walt, and there you celebrate the broad-axe of the pioneer, the raftsman, the bed of boughs in the open, the mother at a mother’s work and singing a melodious song.

Eloquent, these photos, of the gains we’ve made since the horse-car days. They attest to the virtue of a tunnel under a river and a bridge across a gorge. The gun-turrets of the Iowa, the railway tracks that run to infinity, the mile-long hotels in the Adirondacks--these are the achievements of man, they evidence the progress he’s made, and so too do the foundries, the smelters, the coke-ovens and the sensual symbol of the smokestack. Whether they rival Troy or no, our topless towers didn’t go up of themselves, and well may we take pride in the stars of our own that we added to those in the sky. These freight-yards, these ore-docks, these pyramids of coal, these Egypts along the rights-of-way--they’re the doings of our time, Walt.

But for great gains, the cost was great--a paradise lost. We sold it off, we sucked its blood, we sheared it for baseball bats and privy-wood, we fouled its waters, and we made it wear signs, all of which say Buy! You’re missing that, Walt. You don’t have to watch your camaradoes squandering their lives in a ruined Garden.

A strange thing, though, that photos of so much blight should possess so much beauty.