Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains

Abandoned buildings in the West are the subjects of these haunting photographs by Steve Fitch. Some of the pictures show public buildings, but most are of homes. Fitch has photographed interiors rather than the architectural silhouettes that stand out against the empty landscape.

Settlers were attracted to the Great Plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but they didn't stay. Some left even before the Dust Bowl, and much of the rural High Plains is still losing population. The very climate that drove people away now preserves their leavings. There are ruins, datable as any archaeological artifacts, from any presidential administration you might name. Visible everywhere is the detritus of daily life left as if someone will soon return: a coffee cup, a child's drawing, a television set, a half-drunk bottle of beer in a bar.

Anyone who has ever traveled by car through the Great Plains has seen the empty houses that Steve Fitch photographed during the final decades of the twentieth century. Now he lets us into the melancholy beauty of what's left behind. Fitch's essay explains his approach to this project, Evelyn Schlatter and Kathleen Howe set the project in the contexts of the history of the American West and the history of photography, and poet Merrill Gilfillan ponders the meaning of ruins.