A barn with snow on it and the word vanish written in front of it.

Vanish: Disappearing Icons of a Rural America by Jim Westphalen 2017

Westphalen, a self-taught photographer living in northern Vermont, has created a beautiful volume of photographs of what he refers to as the ‘built landscape’, the interaction of architecture with its natural surroundings. His subjects are the decaying and in many cases, the now disappeared rural buildings of Vermont that reflect the history of man’s struggle to wrest a living from the land.

Barns, coal silos, storage sheds, farmhouses are photographed in vivid detail with no fancy framing or alterations.  The weathered wooden planks and shingles, the empty window frames, and listing doorways tell the story of a past in which Vermonters worked a harsh and difficult land to raise animals and crops and move them to market.

One of the joys of living in Vermont and traveling the small dirt roads around the state is to come upon these buildings far off the beaten path.  Westphalen’s book provided a similar joy in a much easier way than navigating these roads in January!

If you enjoy fine photographs or are interested in the intersection of man and nature in rural New England, find this book and leaf through it.  The prose accompanying each photograph is brief and to the point—who owned the land and built the structure in what year and to what purpose.  Spare and direct, like the structures themselves.