Some new photos from Fort Wayne

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This long drive leads back to a farmhouse on Indianapolis Road in southwest Allen County, Indiana. When I was an art student in the late 1990s, I stopped here to ask the old man who lived here for permission to photograph an abandoned schoolhouse that sat on another piece of land he owned on Smith Road. The owner was about my grandparents age, and he demanded to know if I was "A boy or a girl." He didn't approve of my long hair, but he let me photograph the schoolhouse!

I made this photograph earlier this week when we had a couple of mornings with heavy fog in northeast Indiana.
 
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This rundown old building sits at the corner of US-224 and State Road 1 in Wells County, Indiana. It was originally a gas station, but had been used as a "Freebie's Fireworks" store around the Fourth of July holiday. It was closed down by the time I found it in August, 2012. This is in the middle of nowhere about halfway between the small towns of Ossian and Bluffton.
 
My usal comment when I see your photos Chris, very good, interesting and even if the places are empty, abandoned I feel there is a soul anywhere. Probably is the photographer...
robert
 
Thanks Robert. Here's another newly scanned photo from Indiana. I shot this in the small town of Corunna, about 20 miles north of Fort Wayne, in 2009.

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"I try to use my work to understand people through the things they have built."
I like that sentence very much. And I like your photos. Keep on posting...

Thomas
 
Chris I enjoy seeing the forgotten area of Indiana. I'd like to do the same here in North Carolina. I'd be interested in reading of what got you started & perhaps what you might hope to achieve in these photographs the future.
 
Very nice, Chris. The fog shots are perfectly exposed and have a great ethereal feel. Makes me miss Indiana. I grew up in Monroe County....
 
Thanks Helen and BardParker.

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Here's a new one I shot in Fort Wayne a couple weeks ago. The dolls in the window of this store in the Quimby Village Shopping Center caught my eye one morning after I dropped my son off at school. The next time I drove past, they were gone!
 
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This broom is inside the summer kitchen behind the house at the abandoned sheep farm on Pleasant Center Road, east of Bluffton Road, on the southern edge of Allen County, Indiana. Summer kitchens are small buildings that were once used for cooking in the summer, so that the house would not get too hot inside from the wood-burning stoves and ovens used in the 19th century.
 
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This burned-out house stood in front of the abandoned Pure Sealed Dairy on Bass Road, just outside Fort Wayne, Indiana. The stove was the only object in the house that was still recognizable. The remains of the house were demolished soon after I made this photograph in 2008, but the dairy's big barn and other buildings still stood when I drove by them recently. I have some more photos of this place to scan.
 
jsrockit said:
Jealous. Being in NYC makes me year to photograph something like this sometimes. As usual, very nice.
Click to expand...

LOL, I'm always jealous of the guys in places like England that get fog all the time! We used to get a lot in Indiana, even in the cities, but its becoming less common, even in winter.
 
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I wonder who slept on this mattress? It was in one of the upstairs bedrooms of an abandoned farmhouse at the corner of Airport Expressway and Coverdale Road, near Fort Wayne International Airport, in southwest Allen County, Indiana. I made this one in 2008, and the house was demolished in 2011.
 
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