Nice
Community Plumbing
Places Journal
Let’s hear it for the neighborhood hardware store. Here, amidst the nuts and bolts, we cultivate the potential to order things, places, communities, politics, and values — we might even say, to build and repair worlds.
When the Ground Gives Way
Places Journal
Seven years ago, a Louisiana petrochemical operation overlooked warnings and a 6,000-foot-deep cavern collapsed into a sinkhole at Bayou Corne. New photographs show the aftermath of disaster.
Disaster for the People, Bonanza for the State
Places Journal
The Riforma Fondiaria in postwar Italy was supposed to give landless peasants modern farms. An artist, an archeologist, and a historian set out to discover what the abandoned homesteads look like now.
Brasília and the Populist Frontier
Places Journal
In the late 1950s, the construction of Brazil’s new capital city was documented by government photographers who mythologized a new national identity.
David Goldblatt and the Indeterminate Landscape
Places Journal
The South African David Goldblatt spent seven decades photographing the still-unfinished project of building equitable cities, towns, and infrastructures in his nation — and beyond.
Our Unwitting Autobiography
Places Journal
A geographer puts on her social-scientist bifocals to photograph the signs of public yearning macro and micro, near and far, in a summer of protest in Washington, D.C.
Shabby Victorian Metropolis
Places Journal
The place is San Francisco. The time is the funky, unselfconscious interregnum after the Summer of Love and before the tech entrepreneurs.
American Barn
Places Journal
The traditional wooden barn persists as a symbol of prosperity, rectitude, and connection to the land even as family farms have been almost entirely replaced by multinational agribusiness.
Reading Detroit in a Season of Mourning
Places Journal
The grassy mounds that dot Detroit might be scrap heaps, or dumping grounds, or piles of ash and brick. But they are also unintentional artifacts in a tradition of monumentality and commemoration.