What defines the “last moment?”
Who last sat in randomly placed a couch in a field?
Who flipped the final switch to shut down turbines?
Who were the final students to exit a schoolhouse which was their community’s elegant centerpiece?
Who was the last human to work in the massive dairy barn before it was made into ash?
Who last pulled a farmstead’s pump handle to bring forth the rust-tasting water?
When encountering places of abandon my stomach would anxiously churn. Yet therein I felt that I walked among ghosts, those great spirits that preceded my journey on this earth.
Usually uncovered therein is a rich, curious history, one that can be deduced through astute observation. Visiting abandoned places requires being an anthropologist to some degree.
I find clues through artifacts, then empathize and image the lives who traversed this place.
The images which accompany this column are part of a larger series of photographs that explore circumstances of abandonment.
It may have been that moment to just walk away and escape debt. Or to be taken away. Families were disrupted, relocated, hospitalized, or institutionalized. Where was hope to be found?
I try to imagine the last moments, the sensual details of those who walked or were carried away from the livelihood and structures they once knew.
“It seems,” Ansel Adams once wrote, “that almost anything manmade that endures in time, acquires some qualities of the natural.”
Abandoned structures become overgrown, broken, rusted, burned, textural. To me, all became a beautiful photograph accompanied by the human stories I imagined.
Thus is the intriguing beauty of abandonment, things that transform into a final elegance, soon to disappear.
When the farm crisis struck in the 1980s, northeast Iowa became massively and sorrowfully strewn with abandonment, places where incoming money no longer covered expenses to survive. Such was the case in the year 2000 with this abandoned farm near Fredericksburg. One can only imagine the clear, star-packed nighttime sky that enveloped this isolated, elegant farm.