BH Fairchild

My current project, with which I will be involved well into 2003, perhaps longer, is tentatively titled, The Death of the Heart: The Decline of the Small Town in the Rural Midwest. It is a poetry/photography collaboration with Sant Khalsa, formerly a student of Walker Evans. The connection is not irrelevant since his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is unavoidable as a model for what can be done in word/picture collaborations. If I wanted to be a bit more dramatic, I would subtitle our projected book, On the Ghost Town Phenomenon in the Midwest, for what is happening is that rural small towns in the midlands, but elsewhere, too, I think—in particular those located far from interstate highways but near Wal-Mart's and surrounded by corporate farming—are dying at an alarming rate. This summer I drove the country highways through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Oklahoma and was astounded by what I saw. An entire layer of American culture (including folk arts, religious institutions, communal values) is vanishing before, or rather, beyond our eyes. I will never forget driving through Dresden, Kansas, formerly a thriving community of five hundred, with thirty-five businesses, including four newspapers, three grocery stores, and an opera house, is now a town of forty-seven citizens (all elderly) with no businesses and barely a post office. Two miles away is perhaps the most beautiful, and one of the largest, Catholic churches in Kansas (magnificent towers with copper domes, over a million dollars worth of European stained glass) that at one time (when it was surrounded by thousands of small farmers, and their large families, rather than by gigantic corporate farms) would have had seven or eight hundreds souls at high mass. Now they have ten or twenty, and lost their priest a few months ago. Amazing. Sant and I want, through photography and poetry, to give aesthetic presence to this, to create a form to embody historical and cultural loss, to make visible what is vanishing.

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