Posted by David Hamilton on July 16th, 2009

The current issue of The Piedmont Virginian includes a review of photographer Jim Hanna’s recent exhibition, Rural Culture on the Edge.  I’m not familiar with Hanna, but he’s just become a leading contender for official artist of the Baldwin Center, if we are ever to have such a position. 

This series of photographs, including the poorly-scanned thumbnail below, are presented as documents of the rural-suburban interface in Hanna’s native Loudon County.  As one of most rapidly urbanizing counties in the United States, Loudon has been a central battleground for preservation, and a laboratory for many of the tools in the modern land-conservation toolkit. 

Hanna’s images portray these strategies, as well as elements of the purely rural, and of the built environment, in what I think can be a powerful manner.  Despite the image I’ve included, which is pretty darned arresting, the work is not generally pedantic or illustrative, though it is documentary.  It is remarkable how you can hear statistics on farmland conversion, read about impressive conservation campaigns, but nothing brings it home like an image from the “front lines.”

Mostly, Hanna seems to be doing the yeoman’s work of recording what is being lost, and what is being gained, and occaisionally showing the seam where the two collide. Of course, that collision is precisely what the design team at Bundoran Farm has labored to avoid, searching for methods of ecological and aesthetic coexistence between residential and agricultural uses. 

At Bundoran Farm, I’d argue, we’ve sought the precise opposite of Hanna’s image above.  Rather than the clear demarcation of residential and agrarian, which portends the eventual swallowing of the remaindered ag land, we’ve tried to make that seam invisible, in ways intended to recall the way homes and farms commonly coexist in environments of less development pressure.  Agriculture can bend a little, development patterns can bend a lot, and the whole ends up being enriched by good design and legal protections.

I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in photography or land use to check out Mr. Hanna’s website (link above).  I think it’s interesting from either perspective.

Filed under: Agriculture, Architecture and Design, Education and Inspiration, General, Nature/Environment