If photography has taught me anything, it has taught me to see beauty in the mundane. Things I once would have dismissed as boring, or even ugly, now hold a peculiar sense of fascination to me when seen behind the lens.
I drove past this old farmhouse on my way home from dropping my daughter off at school last week. I had never noticed it before, but its hollow windows and sagging porch seemed to send out a message of desperation. The poignancy and urgency I felt to capture this victim of imminent domain, all in the name of progress, was a creative catalyst I couldn't ignore.
As I snapped my photos, the love that this great rambling house had once known was evident. The carefully painted bathroom walls - in a beautiful robin's egg blue, now lay in shattered bits of plaster on the trash-covered floor. The hint of lace curtains beckoned to me in a distant room. The beautiful turned wood of a newel post on a staircase, which probably felt the warmth of children's hands on winter mornings, was illuminated by a hole in the outside wall.
The light in the house was amazing. If I had been braver, I would have ventured inside. But being alone, and seeing the signs of squatters, I decided against it. If it's still there in a week or two, I may go back with a friend. But I doubt it will be. There are roads to build and parking lots to pave.
Old houses store memories. It's one of the things I love about them. Each room in this house held the imprint of every soul who had lived there. The loneliness I felt was profound as I shot these photos. It was a beautiful loneliness: a funeral dirge for impromptu games of horse between father and son, daughters being picked up for prom...and for grandparents dying peacefully in their beds while looking out at the sky.
This is a sad commentary on the disposability of our society - of how we tear down the old things, perceiving them to have less value than the shiny and new. When this house was built, probably over a hundred years ago, it sat on acres of rolling pasture. Now, it's twenty feet from a major thoroughfare.
My uncle had a victorian farmhouse not far from where I live now. It was sold to a developer when I was a teen, the gingerbread trim crushed by bulldozers. I miss that house: the parlor where my dad and his brothers played music. The memory of the fancy furniture in the living room, which my aunt said we weren't allowed to touch. The semi-circle of iron lawnchairs in the yard and the grown-ups talking about boring stuff while we chased fireflies.
Now, in its place, there are hundreds of houses that look exactly the same, as if plopped down by some gigantic die-cutting machine.
Progress? Not in my opinion.
All photos taken with a Canon Rebel XS DSLR 15-85mm lens
Post-production done in LightRoom
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