Weathered buildings

Old buildings are the part of the prairie that I find hardest to drive past. A farmhouse with its windows gone, a barn leaning a little further every winter, a granary standing alone at the end of a field: each one was built by someone who expected it to last, and each one is now slowly being returned to the land.

Black and white suits them. Colour tends to hide what matters about a building like this, and taking it away leaves the grain of the wood, the pattern of peeling paint, and the shape of a roofline against the sky. Snow and heavy clouds do the rest, and the buildings stop looking like ruins and start looking like portraits.

I photograph these places carefully and from the road or the edge of the property, and I never go in. Many of them will be gone in another few years, so these frames are my way of keeping a record of them as they are now.

Leaning barn with a sagging roof in a snowy field

Photos

  • Weathered wood siding on an old prairie building
  • Abandoned farmhouse in a snowy field, seen through the trees
  • Weathered observation cab on an old structure
  • Old log outbuilding covered in snow beside a fence
  • Abandoned arched storefront with a painted brick facade
  • Stone-faced building with a faded Peck Bldg sign
  • Collapsing wooden shed in tall prairie grass
  • Abandoned gas station with old pumps out front
  • Old barn and shed in the snow among bare trees
  • Abandoned farmhouse behind a fallen tree in the snow
  • Rusting car wreck in the bush
  • Collapsed barn on a hillside above a fence line
  • Old car parked in front of a weathered granary
  • Abandoned one-room schoolhouse among the trees
  • Weathered farm building on a dark prairie hill
  • Abandoned two-storey farmhouse under a big sky
  • Sagging farmhouse with a collapsed roof on the prairie

Back to black and white photography, or see prairie landscape photography.