Mr. Bristol's barn

Offering a vivid sense of rural life in the Civil War era, Mr. Bristol's Barn pairs eloquent photographs of a 19th-century barn with moving selections from a farmer's dairy of the same period. Together, text and pictures preserve a bit of Americana that is rapidly fading from memory.

The finely grained photographs of the barn, which was owned by one Abel Bristol and still stands, in upstate New York, were made by the renowned curator, critic, and photographer John Szarkowski. They successfully capture the physical circumstances of life in America more than a century ago, when the vast majority of Americans lived and worked on farms. In photographing the barn, Szarkowski shows it to have a simple dignity of its own; it is a vestige of a time when elaborate works of hand labor were so commonplace as to be taken for granted.

Interwoven with the photographs of the barn are excerpts from the daily of Abel Bristol's neighbor and contemporary, Philo Blinn. Through the scenes recorded of the Blinnfamily's daily lives run continuing threads of human interest that make for a lively and often touching reading experience.