Huntley Barn ~ Winter 2009
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
Arnold Newman
I began photographing barns in Northeastern Illinois because they are rapidly disappearing from the landscape. As cities expand, as bedroom communities surround urban communities, as development slowly closes the gap between one city and the next, the farms that were once the backbone of the economic life of Northeastern Illinois is giving way to shopping malls, chain restaurants, and gasoline stations. The barn, the iconic symbol of the farm, is reinvented as a pizza restaurant in Kane County or simply disappears from view, victim of the wrecker’s ball. I decided to document this iconic structure before they are all gone.
In taking on a project like this, I am asking a number of questions. What is the value of urban sprawl? Does development always mean progress? Does change spell ruination? In this post I want to concentrate on the last question, not diminishing the prior questions, but because it speaks to the underlying reasons that I began this project in the first instance.
As things change, there is a tendency for people to become hyper-critical of that change. Perhaps this happens because one suddenly is unable to predict the future with any degree of confidence. Perhaps because one fails to comprehend the outcome of change. A prime example of this phenomenon is the advent of text messaging and the shorthand language that has grown up around texting. Talk to many people, generally older who didn’t grow up around texting and they will tell you of the ruination of language skills, spelling, writing and the like. What will happen to the younger generation. I submit that this fear of texting is based in a lack of understanding of how language works on the one hand and, on the other, the absolute fear of being shut out of an ongoing conversation. In fact, texting is but one change in language that has occurred over the past ten or so years, a change whose effect is yet to be determined. But texting will not ruin language anymore than the invention of the bound books ruined the scroll as a tool for writing. While one took the place of the other as a more convenient form of writing, the scroll continues to be in use in many cultures as an iconic tool. Something new, often an improvement over the old (and if it is not it will surely fail) is always met with resistance from an older, more conservative generation.
I began photographing barns precisely because I initially understood the push of urban life into a rural context as something akin to evil. That a way of life should give way to the greed of land developers should not go unnoticed. In the course of my photographing barns, however, I have a very different take on the issue. I am no longer appalled by this massive change, this rapid demographic shift. To the contrary, I am coming to the conclusion that the demographic changes are relatively neutral, that they are a natural extension of population growth. Of course, I will continue to find barns in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is low and casts a golden hue across everything. I will continue to document the demise of the barn as an iconic reminder of the rural history of this land. Perhaps I will begin to photograph BP stations and Burger King restaurants as the new icons of the urbanization of what once was a corn field. The contrast might be interesting.
The Huntley Barn ~ Winter 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
