These photographs were taken for my advanced photography class at the University of Missouri, Columbia. They were all taken in Cooper County, Missouri, where my grandparents had a 200 acre farm.

They gave me an atlas of the country from 1915, which had pictures of several houses from that era. The pictures usually had captions such as "Residence of R. P. Edwards". The initial plan was to find the houses and take new pictures in order to display both the old and new. However I was not able to locate enough remaining structures.

Instead I used it to determine the original owners of the house and to label the photographs in the same manner as the atlas. It was also useful to locate promising buildings such as schoolhouses and churches.

The photographs were taken in Spring 1996, mostly April and May. The equipment used was a Hasselblad 500C/M with an 80mm lens, TMax 400 film, and these images were recently re-scanned from the negatives on a CanoScan D1250U.

This project was inspired by the work of Walker Evans, Clarence John Laughlin, and Wright Morris.

Links

Cooper County, Missouri, Photographs

Phillip Beuhler's Modern Ruins Website - more links