Capturing the Vanishing Landscape
Photographers as Historians Part II
This is the second installment of my Photographers as Historians series. The first article can be found in the link below.
One of the aspects I loved most about growing up in New York’s Hudson River Valley was its timelessness. The Hudson River School of Painting, a mid-19th-century American art movement, captured an idealized view of the area I grew up in. Nearly 200 years later, the landscape depicted by painters such as Thomas Cole looks virtually unchanged from when it was captured on canvas.
Many of the places I have lived have changed dramatically during my lifetime. As an antidote to all the changes I have witnessed, as a photographer, I tend to be drawn to subjects that evoke a timeless quality.
For nearly 25 years, I lived in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. During that quarter-century, the town sprouted upwards and outwards around me. Because of the steady drumbeat of growth, or maybe because of my childhood in rural New York, I loved to wander the stillness of the farmlands surrounding Ann Arbor. In particular, the old barns that dotted the landscape drew me in.
I tend to photograph the same subjects again and again, and when the weather is right, I return, cameras in hand, to my tried-and-true landscape subjects. A huge old barn in the cornfields west of Ann Arbor was a favorite location that I returned to many times over the years.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I returned to Ann Arbor for our longest visit since we had moved away ten years ago. One afternoon, when we had some downtime, we drove out through the farm country, and of course, I had to stop by the barn I loved so well.
As we drove into the farmlands and onto Strieter Road, where the barn was located, I struggled to locate the giant structure. At first, I assumed it was because I had lost my central vision in the years since I had last been there. But as my wife drove up and down the road using the GPS coordinates from an iPhone photo, I suddenly realized that the reason I couldn’t find the barn was that it was no longer there.
Given the passage of time since I had last visited, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the old barn was gone, but I was. As we sat parked on the road in front of the patch of land where the barn had once been, a lump formed in my throat. I felt like I had lost an old friend. I asked my wife to drive on.
What I loved about that barn was its massive size and its symmetry. Horseshoe-shaped, it had a grandiosity and elegance about it. Though it had been abandoned for many years, its sheer mightiness made it seem somehow invulnerable to both time and the desires of the farmer who owned the land it stood on.
In culling through photos for this article, I realized that my best images of the barn were those taken in late fall or winter. The grayness and diffused light that come late in the year were a perfect match for the slightly decayed structure.
During the years that I captured images of the barn, not once did it occur to me that one day it would no longer be there, and that these images would exist as historical artifacts. Sadly, sometimes, the value of a photograph is that it captures what has passed.
The following images are some of my favorites of the grand old barn on Strieter Road.
I now live in the Panhandle of Florida near the Alabama border. Less than a mile from my home sits an abandoned farmhouse that has become my new photographic obsession. I have photographed it hundreds of times during various weather conditions.
The old farmhouse has neither the charm nor the grandness of the Michigan barn, but it still draws me in. When I pass by it, I often wonder who used to live there and why it was abandoned. A mere few blocks from my neighborhood of mid-century brick ranches, the farmhouse belongs to a bygone era.
Unlike Michigan, where the pace of growth moves more slowly, Florida is a state that is constantly reshaping itself as its population continues to swell. One day, when I go for a walk, I expect to find a patch of earth where the house once stood. I will lament its passing, as I did with the disappearance of the old barn. Until that day comes, camera in hand, I plan to pay homage to the old structure and its place in the vanishing landscape while I still have the chance.
Unless otherwise noted, all images Copyright Lawrence Lazare
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