The Degeneration of the Family Farm

Exhibition Statement

Most families have a photographic history like the one seen here, and many families have ties to a place that is special to them. That place is still a farm for many. Over time, many small farmsteads have made the very same passage from vitality to abandonment and decay as the one made present by this exhibition. The story here is not of one farm family, but the passing of the small family farm.

The historical black and white photographs of the people are the thread that stitches the whole of the exhibition together. The black and white photographs are documents, artifacts of the lives lived in this place. They are encapsulated moments in time.

The color prints of the farmstead are subjective interpretations of its “present” state. Texture, and the expressive rendering, capture that sense of the extraordinary we often associate with places that hold significant meaning for us. It is that special personal appeal the place has because of memories associated with it. The objective reality of the camera’s recording is one of decay and ruin. The process of filtering the objective photographic images through memory and familiarity forms a fiction true to the remembrance in its intensity and enhanced grandeur.

The minimal spacing between the images of the place and those of the people who lived there disallows seeing them as separate. They are integral. They both inhabit the same space in memory. There, and here, there is a unity of the place with the people, and the people with the place. As its people passed and generations moved away, this family farmstead, like so many others, lost its reason for being. It also passed, and with it, a way of life is quietly past.