Abandoned House from the series The Inhabitants

During the 1930s and 1940s, Wright Morris made photographs of simple buildings such as farmhouses, barns, and small-town businesses set in the surrounding landscape of rural Nebraska, where he grew up.  Morris, who was a writer as well as a photographer, paired pictures like Abandoned House with narrative texts in his book The Inhabitants (1946). He obviously felt affection for the austere house and bleak landscape of the Midwestern plains and admired the ability of the photograph to describe the quotidian details of the setting in the same way that his writings gave voice to the people who lived there.