since it loves us
and forgives everything,
why was it abandoned forever?
Lyubov Sirota
What an exciting moment start of a new project. That is of cause when you know you start it. This project has begun before I knew it…
I’ve been traveling a lot to an area in the Eastern Washington called Palouse. This area offers really beautiful landscapes with rolling hills and patches of fields. Some call it American Toscana. While looking for beautiful landscapes to photograph I was driving thru small towns in this area and sometimes stopping, looking around and photographing of cause. Over time collection of these photographs grew and I was not sure why I was taking those photograph and what to do with them.
Riding from Seattle (where I live) to Palouse is a bliss – 4 hour drive across Washington state from West to East at about 70 miles per hour. There are quite a few towns you pass by on the way there. I used to drive thru them without ever stopping. Except once I travelled with a fellow photographer who wanted to get a coffee and we stopped in Ellensburg. Ellensburg turned out to be an interesting town, its historic center had a lot of old buildings. While walking its streets I realized that this is what attracted me in all other towns. The historic centers of many towns in Central and Eastern Washington look very old. And it is not like they are preserved for a history. They look abandoned like orphan children, they want some attention but don’t get it. While passing thru some of them I would find their streets empty almost like ghost towns. Some towns are slowly disappearing. In others people for some reason have moved away from their historic centers.
Once I noticed this pattern I begun to stop in every town on my way and capture those old town centers in their vanishing act. And thus the project “Olde Town, WA” was born.
Antiques
vitali prokopenko | fine art 