The Photo Venture Camera Club, the club I belong to in Indianapolis, goes on field trips nine or ten times a year.  Yesterday ten of us went to Madison, IN, a picturesque town on the Ohio River, about two hours from Indianapolis.  We couldn’t have asked for better weather on this crisp fall day.

The weather had been rainy all week but Saturday morning was clear with some fleecy clouds.

I haven’t been much for photographing buildings but this trip was to an area known for its architecture.  I’ m not sure that a number of images I got of buildings and details of buildings were what the Chamber of Commerce had in mind but I would go back for more shots like this:

I have images of beautiful homes from this trip but none of them come close to competing with this window and clapboard wall that have seen better days.

That black space at the top of the garage was perhaps once a window.  Its gothic shape, coupled with the cross-like appearance of the structure on top (an old antenna?) lend it the appearance of a church.

There are a lot of alleys in Madison too.

And then there was the Tea Room:

What is it about these old buildings, details and alleys that makes them so interesting?  One answer won’t hold for all of them but a couple of ideas pop to the surface for me as I look at them.  One is they all have texture, they have a definite tactile sense to them.  They seem to want to be touched.   Their histories seem to be told in their roughness in ways that an image doesn’t quite convey.

This leads into another part of the attraction of these subjects.  They all have stories that we can only guess at.  I have a friend who spends a lot of time photographing an abandoned farm, the location of which she protects about as well as some people protect the location of a good fishing hole.  She is thinking of doing a photo book about it in which she shows the images and tells her own version of what life on that farm might have been like.

I don’t know the stories here but I do know that I plan to look more closely for old abandoned buildings.  They speak to us in ways new buildings, living buildings if you will, don’t.