Entropy: Columns at Old Baylor

April 5th, Entropy: Columns at Old Baylor Today, Janet and I got up at 3:30am, drove over two-hundred miles on three dollars plus gasoline, got several pictures on the entropy theme and selected this one. In hindsight I am not particularly pleased with the selection. The buildings that these columns represent, the original Baylor University campus at Independence, Texas, are all gone. The columns have been rebuilt to represent the university.

I also shot an old house, some rusting farm equipment and an unidentifiable article of discarded clothing. The choices were between three of the images but none of them other than possibly the clothing actually fall within the narrow category that I would like to pursue.

Both the old house and the farm equipment are much too colorful to evoke the feeling of disappearing into an universal uniformity although they eventually will; the clothing was fairly nondescript and still too whole. Everwhat.

The narrower description is more difficult to find good examples so some days I am just going to have to accept the broader definition of simply broken.

On the house I had applied a desaturation and grayed the sky which I believe is more appropriate. I like the weeds and bushes that have grown up blocking the building because they give a separateness, loneliness, a sense of passing away with private dignity to the building. Old buildings, especially houses should be somber. Having read Kilmer’s poem The House With Nobody In It, it is difficult to see an abandoned house any other way, “But a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life, That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife, A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet, is the saddest sight when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.” A lot of photographers are intrigued by dilapidated barns, and they are interesting but they just do not have the ambiance or character of an abandoned house after reading Kilmer.