High Top Pentecostal Church - Greene County, Virginia

I had been driving for what seemed like miles and miles on a one lane dirt road when I finally came upon the church and stopped. I got out of the truck and watched the dust I had raised drift over the edge of the mountain. The air was cool at this elevation. The first promises of spring were in the breeze and the sunlight.

I was somewhat disappointed. In front of me stood a plain wooden clapboard building. At first, I wasn't sure it was a church at all but then I spotted the sign over the front doors. This was not the quaint country church that I had hoped to find. The empty and neglected church building had no steeple, no pointed or stained glass windows, no columns or decorated cornices. As I stood in the silence and looked past the unlovely church across the mountains, it seemed about the most lonesome place I had ever been.

Who came here from isolated mountain homes to worship? Who came to this place to visit with neighbors and perhaps share with friends a church dinner on the wooden tables outside? How many couples came to this place to be married? Whose loved ones rest in the small cemetery just down the dusty road?

I am here alone, with no sound but the breeze rising in the mountain hollow behind this empty church, stirring the budding trees.

Madison County, Virginia

“Place conspires with the artist. We are surrounded by our own story, we live and move in it. It is through place that we put out roots.”    - Eudora Welty

This barn is on the other side of the road from the barn that appears in this post. Both pictures were taken at the same time on the same day. The color photo above is digital, the black and white photo in the earlier post was taken on film. It would be interesting to know the story behind these two unusual barns.

Heidelberg, Germany - 1972

I found out earlier this week that David Plowden has announced a new book, Requiem for Steam, to be published by W.W. Norton this fall (2010). I also just bought the Spring 2010 issue of Classic Trains magazine, and it included a lengthy excerpt from the upcoming book.

Even if you are not a railroad enthusiast, Plowden is one of the outstanding photographers of 20th Century America whose work has focused on recording the once commonplace things that are vanishing from the American scene. In the article in Classic Trains, Plowden describes a photo excursion that he undertook in March, 1960, to document the last day of regular-service steam operation on the Canadian Pacific Railway.

By the early 1960s, steam locomotives had all but disappeared from North America. When I was in Germany in the early 1970s, steam was still alive, and I was able to take pictures of working steam locomotives. The picture above was taken by me in the early Spring of 1972, near Heidleberg, Germany.

Tangiers Sound, Crisfield, Maryland

Photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine, © Copyright Jennifer B. Bodine

A. Aubrey Bodine was a newspaperman. His career with the Baltimore Sun began in 1923 when his first picture was published while he was still an office boy for the paper. Later he was promoted into the photographic department where he spent the next 50 years photographing Baltimore and the surrounding region, both for the newspaper and for his own personal ends.

Over time, newspapermen develop a close connection to the people and places where they work, and this sense of place combined with Bodine's artistic ambition produced a body of work that transcends the craft of the newspaper photographer and lays claim to art.

"His pictorial art was a result of unique talent, hard work and darkroom magic. He was an artist in the full sense of the word."   Harold A. Williams, Bodine: A Legend in His Time.

Bodine admired Edward Steichen, and his own style is most often referred to as Pictorialist. But his photographs avoid the vague and dreamy aspects that often characterize the work that we associate with pictorialism. The style is romantic, but clearly seen and descriptive. Perhaps Romantic Documentary is a better description of his style. He was a meticulous craftsman and used all of the technical tools at his disposal to realize his artistic vision.

The Baltimore Sun has a gallery of Bodine's work that serves as a good introduction to the artist's work.

The A.Aubrey Bodine website, operated by the artist's daughter, Jennifer Bodine, has a wealth of information, including the full text of Bodine, A Legend In His Time, a biography by Harold A. Williams, who was Bodine's editor at the Sun. The website also features thousands of Bodine's photographs arranged by themes and categories.

Thanks to the folks at the A. Aubrey Bodine website for kind permission to reproduce the photo above. Photography In Place is not affiliated with AAubreyBodine.com and does not profit in any way from it.

“Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course. These charges need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life that life needs.”  - Eudora Welty

From “Place in Fiction” in Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling, eds., Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoir (1998).

Emmanuel Episcopal Church - Rapidan, Virginia

It hardly seems fair that one very small town should have two beautiful carpenter gothic churches. Last Sunday we looked at Rapidan's Waddell Memorial Presbyterian Church. Just across the Rapidan river, on the edge of the town, stands Emmanuel Episcopal Church.

Emmanuel was build in 1874, the same year as Waddell, in a park-like setting on the edge of town. The Rapidan River runs close by and open farmland forms the backdrop to the church grounds. More restrained architecturally than the Waddell Church, this may be the more beautiful of the two churches. But there is no reason to choose between them for they are both vivid examples of the strength of vision and craftsmanship in 19th century America.

Criglersville - Madison County, Virginia

It is easy to focus on the picturesque and quaint out in the country. But buildings like these, with the silo in the background and the powerlines running into the distance, express the ordinary beauty of working and living in the rural areas of Virginia.