American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape [Hardcover]

Maxwell MacKenzie (Photographer), Henry Allen (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2001

One of the most important architectural photographers working today, MacKenzie chronicles a fast-disappearing manifestation of the American Dream---the eloquent remains of barns, houses, and schools erected by immigrant settlers. His crisp black-and-white prints provide a poignant reminder that architecture sometimes becomes most evocative when it slips toward ruin.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Photos capture 'humble buildings' of prairie"
The quotations that accompany the photographs are as spare and lovely as MacKenzie's work, and each plays off the other.
--Robert Armstrong
Star Tribune Staff Writer
Sunday, June 24, 2001 --Star Tribune, Arts

Maxwell Mackenzie's American Ruins, is much more than a simple documentation of "forgotten places of American human habitation." ... Mackenzie has produced...a visual treat for the panorama enthusiast as well as history buffs and photographers of all genre.
--Gregory W. Blank --Photovision Art & Technique Magazine

Although the photos do not show exactly how lives were lived, their power lies in their eerie ability to conjure up personal and collective tales that lead one to wonder, additionally enhancing the impact of the images...In their quiet but commanding way, they too say a great deal, MacKenzie seemingly reiterating the notion that since this is all that remains, attention must be made.
--Judy Birke, freelance writer and art consultant --CTcentral.com - Connecticut's Premier Web Site --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Afton Historical Society Press; 1st edition (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189043440X
• ISBN-13: 978-1890434403
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 9.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,693,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic as vision, as truth, August 4, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape (Paperback)

American Ruins is far more than it appears. On the surface, it is a very well designed and exquisitely photographed essay on the vanishing farmsteads of the northern plains states in the USA. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is a woman.

On the next plane, the photographs-panoramics mainly, in black-and-white on infrared film-are beyond photography. They are a spiritual experience on paper that comes as close to the experience of truth as can be done without becoming it yourself. They are haunting, wistful, emotional evocations of the pain of time and loss, the invisible presence of people in what the picture does not, cannot, show, in the way that only black-and-white can push you out of "that" into "thisness." As the foreword puts it: "... as if the camera has recorded something going on inside your head and projected it onto a wall." Small wonder many feel black-and-white is the most difficult image recorder to work with, and also to many the most sublime when done well.

Sublime Mr. MacKenzie is. This is one of the most remarkably photographed books to come off the presses in a long time. Not just well done, but literally beyond compare; the sole occupant of its category. The photographs are closer to poetry without a pen than to the interaction between film and lens. Songs without words in an A-4 landscape book. The only thing to match them is the writing excerpts that "captions" them. (The captions in the conventional sense are Notes at the end of the book.) Mr. MacKenzie chose the excerpts himself, and he certainly did his homework well. Wallace Stegner is here, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Henry Miller, Frank Lloyd right, and two writers who would probably be surprised to find their sentences thrust alongside the eloquence of this book. But here they are, and no the less eloquent:

"When family love is displaced onto land, every change that happens there has meaning: the calibre of the light and the texture of the clouds in a day, the big changes of the seasons, most of all the slow transformation of the infrastructure of the place itself as the decades pass. When the deflection of love is also a deflection of pain, the gradual decomposition of such a place can be excruciating, a kind of lifelong torture, and yet, at the same time, a hypnotic, unfolding story. As the place declines, layers of meaning are revealed."

=Suzannah Lessard, "The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family"

To which Annette Atkins adds, in "Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance* in Minnesota, 1872-78":

"Minnesota lost settlers during the dark days of the 1870s . . . but thousands remained. Some could afford to stay; some could not afford to leave. Debts held some. Others wanted to hold on to their investments of time and energy. Some held different attachments; as one man explained: `I have lost my all here, & somehow I believe that if I find it again, it will be in the immediate neighborhood where I lost it . . . I have a child buried on my claim & my ties are stronger & more binding on that account.'"

In between is writing that calls our attention to what the unrushed eye can see: ". . . leaning barns and windowless houses, jutting up like wreckage in oceans of furrowed wheat and sorghum, architecture that looks more like a visible absence of something, like a missing tooth, than it looks like a presence of sun-curled clapboard and tatters of tar paper. It looks like ruins . . . of dreams that didn't work out."

Then he goes beyond all that, to the lives unseen in these pictures, flesh long gone but souls still there, a kind of spirit of determination to match this spirit of place: ". . . boredom, bad luck, debt, despair; about the blizzard that leaves you burning your inside walls to stay alive because if you go outside for firewood you'll vanish; about a summer erupting with wheat until the grasshoppers darken the sky and eat everything-wheat, vegetable garden, even the leaves on the trees; about a husband who tells his wife he'll be right back after he rides out to round up two cows-she watches him ride around the cows and keep going and he never comes back."

Beauty of a special kind, these-of death, decay, the falling to ruin-but life of a kind all the more: eonic, seasonless as a century, brutal cold and brutal heat, wind vying only with grass for endlessness, and to the human who endures these and thus surpasses the self, transfiguration. Into this, the Great Plains, families came, filled with grit and ambition and not a few starry-eyed dreams. They are still here, here in these pictures. Look around the corners and there they are, in the boards of the barn they nailed, among the leaves in the trees they planted. With all that's in this book, we can see what we never would have before, the eyes of dreams become the last remains of a rainbow.

That said, this is what books used to be in the highest sense of the craft. And still are, if only we seek out and buy the work of presses like the Afton Historical Society.

4.0 out of 5 stars American Ruins, January 22, 2012

By 

Mary L. Morgan (Fort Madison, Iowa..USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape (Paperback)

This book arrived on time as described.....I haven't read it because I gave it as a gift. The person who received it was pleased but I haven't heard anything else about it. Thanks.

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, March 22, 2010

By 

Janet Hunt (Arizona) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape (Paperback)

This is the perfect example of Maxwell Mackenzie genius. His books of old farm photos are a joy to look at over and over again. Makes you want to see more.