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Category Archive: places
I have finally gotten around to processing some more film from a very rewarding trip to the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado last year. I will certainly be going back there again this year, later in the Spring when the heavy snows have past but before the major snowmelt swells all the local [...]
a photographic ode to the grain elevator I I have written in the past about silos and grain elevators and the attraction of the their stark, pure forms dominating the midwest landscape. A couple of hundred years ago, English gentlemen would race their horses to the next church steeple poking its head above the lanscape, [...]
Housing construction has been in the dumps in the last few years. This means that not only the large, market developer home builders are out of work, but so are the small general contractors and all the associated trades – plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. Things are pretty dire but they do seem to be picking [...]
As I have talked about in a couple of recent posts on the flatness of the Midwest, a simple building standing in that relentlessly horizontal landscape is a powerful, singular moment. This is even more apparent when it is a church, rising upward to heaven, a determinedly vertical building contrasting the vast horizon. Unlike other [...]
On a narrow spit of land, at the confluence of two mighty rivers, lies ancient Cairo. Not the one in Africa, with pyramids and camels, rather the one along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Cairo, Illinois. Cairo has seen better days, the 1920 population of 15,000 having dropped below 3,000 souls. Once a shipping center [...]
Before interstate engineers replaced our river crossings with solid, straight, under-supported super-slabs of concrete highways, spidery steel bridges carried us across the impediments to the relentless to- and fro- of an increasingly mobile society. When you pass through the steel rib cages of these older bridges, especially the narrow, long spans, crossing a river feels [...]
On a recent roadtrip I followed the path of two of America’s most famous roads – the Oregon Trail and old Route 66. They say the adventure is in the journey, not the destination, but both of these pathways existed to traverse the country as quickly and safely as possible on the way to the [...]
Most of the smaller towns that I passed through on a recent road trip had their version of the local movie palace. And most were closed down along with the rest of the storefronts along the main street. The emptiness of middle America is remarkable and so sad. We all hear the [...]