RI exec assists Ken Burns on Dust Bowl film

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — It was during a lunch break more than 30 years ago that Jim Pontarelli starting combing through the Dust Bowl photographs.

He was an aide to then-Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee with what he called a “secret ambition” to become a photographer. So the Narragansett resident would hole up at the Library of Congress whenever he could, pulling pictures that documented the worst ecological disaster ever to strike the U.S — through the face of a migrant mother with her children huddled against her, through abandoned farms, through the dunes of dirt. He bought some of the old equipment the photographers had used to make those pictures, built a darkroom in his basement and became a student of their ways.