Some new photos from Fort Wayne

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Here's the sheep farm's outhouse back in 2009, when the place was still sitting abandoned.

This one is in February, 2012. The outhouse had been repainted! Before it had been bare, weathered wood.

This was a couple of days after the storm knocked it down; in November, 2012.

 

[farlymac]

They don't make 'em like they used to.

PF

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Yesterday afternoon, I met a local couple who are taking photography lessons from me at the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. I made a couple of photographs of some white orchids while I was there.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Here is another new one from my archives. I shot it in 2009.


Graffiti covers a lot of the walls in the bedrooms of this abandoned 19th Century farmhouse on County Road 1100N, just east of County Road 100E in Adams County, Indiana.​

This wall's graffiti was written by several girls, probably teens, who put their names, the dates they were there, and the names of the boys they were in love with! One girl drew a tombstone that says "Love Hurts" and another drew a cross wrapped in a thorny vine with "Lust" written in a heart drawn in the center of the cross.​

• Amanda Jean Franz was here March 31, 1995 and loves Richard Koldyke and Phil Bodle.​

• Jennifer James Franz was here March 31, 1995.​

• Mandie Franz was here November 17, 1996 and loves Richard Koldyke and Phil Bodle. Mandie signed the drawing of the tombstone.​

• We are #1​

• Lisa Mowery was here November 17, 1996 and loves Phil Bodle Always -N- 4-ever. Lisa signed the drawing of the cross.​

I graduated from high school in 1994. The kids who wrote this are probably just a couple of years younger than I am. They would have been around 30 years old when I photographed their probably long-forgotten messages almost 6 years ago. I wonder what they would say today?

Here's the outside of the house:​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Still working through my archives. I made this photograph almost three years ago, in March, 2012. Old metal chairs like these have been a favorite subject for me since I was a teenager, when I began photographing the pair of them my grandparents had.

This pair of them (they're almost always found in pairs, but not always matching styles) is in front of a house in the neighborhood where I grew up, and is around the block from the house I live in now.

 

[ian_watts]

Here's the sheep farm's outhouse back in 2009, when the place was still sitting abandoned.

These Fort Wayne photos are always interesting but I particularly like this one.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

These Fort Wayne photos are always interesting but I particularly like this one.

Thanks, Ian. I loved the light that morning.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

The walls and most of the roof are completed on this new Family Dollar store under construction on the east side of Bluffton Road in Fort Wayne, Indiana.​

I first photographed this scene four months before I made this photograph. In September of 2013, this was a vacant lot, covered in grass, where a company that built dump trucks had once been located.​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This is an insurance agent's office in the small town of Mexico, Indiana.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I made this photograph of Mary Mora during my last visit with her, during my trip to New Mexico in 2011. She was laughing while telling me a story about a customer she threw out of her bar a few days earlier. The woman saw Mary's horde of cats walking around, and told Mary that she didn't like cats. Mary said that she told the woman: "The door opens and it closes both ways, you don't like my cats, you can get the hell out!"​

She was 95 years old, and no longer working behind the counter of the bar her father started 80 years earlier in the small mining town of Cerrillos, New Mexico. Her daughter is running the bar for her now. Mary is 99 years old now.
​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I went back to this group of scraggly-looking trees in the middle of an empty field many times over the years, until they were bulldozed to allow the expansion of a landfill in 2009. I made this on an especially cold day in March, 2004.

 

[presspass]

Chris, as always you capture rural scenes as they are rather than as the tourists would have them. I enjoy your work, archives and all. Many thanks.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Chris, as always you capture rural scenes as they are rather than as the tourists would have them. I enjoy your work, archives and all. Many thanks.

Thanks, Presspass. I live in a place where tourists don't go. We don't have mountains, canyons, untouched wilderness. Most of Indiana is farmland, outside of the cities. Other photographers who live here travel to 'picturesque' places in the USA, like California or Arizona, or they travel to other countries. I ask them why they don't photograph here, and they say "There's nothing here worth photographing." I disagree; I've lived here most of my life, and there is beauty here. I lived in New Mexico for a couple of years. I found it depressing. Everything is brown and dead. There is no life. No forests, little wildlife (except rattlesnakes!), no lakes, no green.

New Mexico wasn't completely ugly. There is a lot of beauty there too, but I like the midwest better. Here is one thing I did like there. One of the few plants one commonly saw in New Mexico were sunflowers. The wild sunflowers were different than the sunflowers people elsewhere grow in their gardens. These plants had multiple small flowers, rather than one large one as garden sunflowers do. This was in the front yard of one of my neighbors in Santa Fe.

 

[farlymac]

Every time I go home, I always try to set a day aside to just drive around in the county taking photos, Chris. Nothing more beautiful than a field of soybean plants right after a rainstorm.

Egg Factory by br1078phot, on Flickr

What passes for "street" photography in Indiana

Waldron General Store by br1078phot, on Flickr

PF

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Every time I go home, I always try to set a day aside to just drive around in the county taking photos, Chris. Nothing more beautiful than a field of soybean plants right after a rainstorm.

Egg Factory by br1078phot, on Flickr

What passes for "street" photography in Indiana

Waldron General Store by br1078phot, on Flickr

PF

I like that second one a lot. What does the graffiti say? It is hard to read on the screen but looks like it says that someone (I can;t read the name) is a whore!

 

[farlymac]

Not sure, Chris, it's pretty much gone over with other paint. Maybe if I'd had a green filter on that day we might know.

PF

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Near the end of 2013, I noticed this sculpture standing on the edge of a limestone quarry just outside Fort Wayne, Indiana. It is a concrete replica of a Moai statue, the famous monumental sculptures built by the Rapa Nui, the Polynesian people of Easter Island in the South Pacific.​

The quarry is the Hanson Limestone quarry whose entrance is on Ardmore Avenue. The statue is visible from Lower Huntington Road, just east of Smith Road. It is an out of the way rural place, not the kind of place one would normally install something like this. It is set back quite far from the road, so most drivers on Lower Huntington Road probably don't notice it.​

I photographed it close to sunset. in May, 2014.
​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Teenage vandals smashed grandpa's mailboxes several times over the years, and each one took its place on the junk pile in grandpa's back yard. The rural area grandpa lived in did not have trash collection service until the last few years of his life, so he burned his trash. Old appliances and other non-burnable items rusted away among the ashes on the burn pile.

I shot this photo of it in 2002.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped at the best bookstore in the world, Hyde Brothers Books on Wells Street in Fort Wayne. I bought two history books and photographed this scene hidden in the store's back room.

There is a picture of Jesus Christ taped to the door of the store's electrical breaker box. The bookshelves to the right of Jesus are part of the store's religious books section. The shelves on the left hold books about crafts and scrapbooking.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

These trees stand in a field on the east side of County Road 500E, just north of County Road 900S, in Wells County, Indiana. I thought it interesting that their rounded tops seemed to form a single circular shape.

I photographed them earlier this evening.