Above: A grand stone staircase is all that remains of a once fine home in the woods of New Hampshire. https://edward-fielding.pixels.com/featured/accendance-edward-fielding.html

Ruins, like photographs, are a glimpse to the past. I love finding evidence of previous human occupation. 

People today driving around New Hampshire and Vermont have no understanding that the landscape was mostly tree-less only 100 years ago.

Just about all the usable timber was cut. Whole villages that served the lumber industries are gone.  Today New Hampshire is 86% forested, but it wasn’t that long ago that enviromental activists raised the alarm that so much timber was being clear cut in the Mount Washington area that it was causing sever environmental damage in the form of flooding and soil erosion.

Wooden structures don’t last long in this area. Stone cellar holes, a rusty old bucket and wells are usually the only evidence left behind. 

Unlike out west where the dry weather and treeless landscape make discovery and preservation easy, most of the “ruins” in the east disappear under forest reclamation.

Ruins in Art

Ruins as a subject in art has been popular for a long time.

“In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the “ruin lust” that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.” 

Do Ruins Photographs Sell? Sometimes…

I shoot a lot for creepy Mystery and Crime novels. I love me some old decaying stuff. 

What photographer doesn’t like the texture of a rusty old car or the bleached wood of an old brothel in a ghost town? Patina, weathered wood, rusting iron. Beautiful stuff! 

Does it sell as living room art? Not usually. 

Ozymandias 

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lie, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.