20.12.18 Vestiges

By Scott Shephard

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Here I am again, though time has passed from the photos in recent posts. Like the blue jeans I’m wearing, the smile has faded a bit. But it’s still genuine and no doubt a little wiser.

Looking at this photo makes me sad and maybe that’s why I have given the photo a dark and moody feel. I’m sad because the old farm house I’m standing in no longer exists. Like Iron Creek in the Black Hills, it was a place of pilgrimage for me for many years. I would go there to take photos but sometimes I would go there just to be out in the country. One day I drove out to the old farmstead and all that was left was a bulldozed pile of trees and rubble. My first thought was that I missed a turn. When I realized I was in the right place, my next thought was “Who said they could do this?” Apparently, someone else had bought the land and needed a few more acres of crop land. For the record, I never owned this property but it felt a little like I belonged there.

I took a lot of photos of the old farm because I found the house and grounds photogenic, It was more than a mere subject, however. Those who have explored old farm houses may understand what I am about to say.

You see, the abandoned house was still alive. Though I never encountered ghosts, I could hear the voices and sounds of the people who used to inhabit this special place when I stood in its rooms and walked among the old farm equipment. When I walked on the wooden floors, I walked where countless others had walked decades before. I imagined the meals enjoyed here, and the births and the deaths that likely happened within these walls. I also wondered what the last residents of this place were thinking when they walked away from it. Happiness? Sadness? Nothing? I’ll never know.

The title of this post is “Vestiges” which is an interesting word. It means “fragment,” “relic,” “remnant” and “echo,” among other things. A vestige can exist in fact and in memory. But it can also exist in photos. While the house is gone and forgotten now, and so, too, are the people who used to live here, the photos remain. They are vestiges.

I turn 67 today and I guess I’m a vestige, too. The tone of this post is perhaps a bit somber, but that’s not how I feel about being a “fragment, relic, remnant or echo” of my former self. So far COVID-19 hasn’t bulldozed me like it has so many of my generation. With a little luck, the right diet, proper exercise and social distancing, I’ll make it to 68.

06-27-12 Sadness

What you see in this photo is a pile of debris in the middle of a cornfield. But what I see is much more, for this pile is all that remains of a farmstead north of Watertown, South Dakota, that had become for me a place of photographic pilgrimage.This farmstead had an old house, a fairly large barn and two other out buildings that were part of the farming operation years ago. The buildings were subjects hundreds of photos I have taken. It was also what I called "the north studio," because I took many of my senior portrait subjects to this location due to its wealth of good locations for pictures. More recently, I took some of my LATI photo students there to share this great location. The photos they took are likely the last photos that were taken of this South Dakota relic.The group Kansas was right when they sang that "Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky." And so I suppose it was inevitable that an abandoned farm would be bulldozed and turned into crop land. But I feel like I've lost a friend. This place had an important place in my personal history and it had a soul that had become part of my soul.But at least I have the photos. . . .