On the Subject of Barns, Silos, and Rural Exploration

A curatorial note on barn photography, silo photography, provenance, and structures that have earned our respect in combat

In our younger and more formative years, several members of TCG Gallery lived in the Midwest, where there were ample opportunities for urban exploration. Unfortunately, much of what passed for urban exploration was actually rural exploration: abandoned farmhouses, collapsing distilleries, forgotten equipment, grain bins, silos, and barns.

So many barns.

The barns became curatorial fatigue. The silos became personal.

Urban exploration, often called urbex, is the exploration and photography of abandoned, hidden, or restricted parts of the built environment. In New York City, that usually means a rooftop, a tunnel, some forgotten piece of transit infrastructure, or going all the way to Queens in search of the closest available approximation of an industrial ruin. In Kentucky and across the Midwest, the same impulse leads to farmhouses, grain elevators, and barns at the ends of roads that stopped appearing on maps sometime during the Eisenhower administration.

Suburban exploration has no similarly stable definition. For our purposes, suburban exploration is a riding mower: holding a beer in one hand, steering with the other, then pressure-washing a driveway that was already clean while monitoring Nextdoor for coyotes.

At the novice end, urbex can become an overplayed hashtag attached to coordinates acquired in an Instagram DM, sometimes after paying for a location that has already been photographed into submission by everyone with a kit lens and an HDR slider. HDR remains a coin toss: either it turns a genuinely boring photograph into something gloriously nauseating, or it converts an image so mundane that it was almost poignant into eye vomit.

Veterans tend to work differently. They follow obscure blogs last updated in 2009, reverse-engineer analog photographs, ask a gas station cashier for directions that can only be considered a song, and drive hundreds of miles to find an abandoned cathedral or an entire town. Some locations belong only in song.

Do not ask us for locations. Do not blow up the spot.

The subjects overlap. The etiquette does not.

Rural Is Not Urban

An abandoned city building usually has an address, property records, fences, cameras, or at least a municipal department prepared to ruin your afternoon.

A rural barn can look deserted while remaining part of an active farm, a family inheritance, or private property watched from a house you did not notice half a mile away. Remoteness is not abandonment, and an Instagram geotag is not permission.

City photographers sometimes mistake silence for access. Far enough into Virginia or West Virginia, “fuck around and find out” may arrive by way of someone's great-granddaddy's squirrel rifle. Not because the barn contains treasure. It probably contains a rusted 1930s Ford that has not moved since 1950 and a toolbox full of nails. It is still somebody's Ford, somebody's nails, and somebody's barn.

If nobody comes at you with the squirrel rifle, you may instead run afoul of the county sheriff, who will take you out to the outskirts of town, beat you with a phone book, and tell you never to come back. Based on true events. The point is not that every rural county operates like a lost episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. The point is that city assumptions about anonymity, access, and neutral authority do not always travel well.

That is the dichotomy between urban and rural exploration: the ruin may look anonymous, but the land rarely is.

The Provenance of the Barn

Barns are vernacular architecture. They were built for use, altered as needs changed, and repaired by generations who did not always consult an architect, a building department, or anyone with a strong commitment to paperwork. Building records may tell only part of a barn's provenance. The rest survives in hand-hewn beams, patched siding, tool marks, joinery, and nails.

A square-looking nail is a clue, not a birth certificate. Hand-wrought nails generally point to before about 1800. Machine-cut nails appeared later, while round wire nails became common in the 1890s. Early Americans sometimes even burned unwanted buildings and recovered the nails from the ashes, which is either admirable thrift or a dramatic commitment to not visiting the hardware store.

Saw marks can also reveal how the lumber was milled. Straight marks may come from an old sash saw, while curved marks suggest a circular saw. No single clue can date the whole structure because barns are patched, rebuilt, and patched again. Provenance is an argument made from layers.

Rural ruins also contain two recurring fixtures no building record will explain: an inexplicably placed toilet and a pit of death. The pit may be an old well, a cistern, a sewer drain, or simply the place where the floor stopped existing, but there is always a pit of death, usually about three steps from the toilet.

If the beams are hand-hewn, the nails are square, and daylight is visible through the floor, admire the wood from somewhere that does not require a tetanus booster.

The Silo Problem

Barns are repetitive. Silos are sinister.

To the city eye, a silo or grain bin is pure geometry: corrugated metal, impossible height, hard shadows, and a ladder leading to a photograph nobody else has. To the rural eye, it may also be a machine built around grain, gravity, and several spectacular ways to disappear.

Grain entrapment occurs when moving or collapsing stored grain immobilizes and buries a person. A person can become trapped at knee level within three to four seconds and completely buried in under twenty. Wikipedia's grain entrapment article summarizes the nightmare efficiently: a body can sink in seconds, suffocate in minutes, and take hours to recover.

OSHA warns that moving grain behaves like quicksand and can pull a person under in seconds. Never stand or walk on stored grain, and never enter a grain bin while grain-handling equipment is operating.

This is why a silo is not merely another abandoned structure to us. It is rural architecture with a body count. Photograph the geometry, the landscape, the rust, and the long shadow across the field. Remain on the side of the structure where the atmosphere is made primarily of air.

The Higher Barn Standard

At this point, this has completely diverged from photography. It has become a warning to the intrepid, possibly novice explorer, especially the younger generation that mistakes a hashtag for permission and believes being tagged by an urbex account is worth martyrdom. It is not. Stay away from the hollers of Kentucky and West Virginia unless you know exactly whose land you are on and what is under your feet.

Indiana is Cracker Barrel: prettier barns, crushing boredom, and somehow more racism. Kentucky is Waffle House: friendlier, louder, armed to the teeth, and held together by mutually assured squirrel-rifle diplomacy. It is a constitutional-carry state, so for narrative purposes, assume every Kentuckian has at least two weapons on them at all times. This is something New Yorkers can understand legally but never spiritually.

TCG Gallery's original Abandoned theme grew out of our first building, which was itself abandoned before it became a gallery and remains vacant today. It is still our most popular theme. Perhaps that explains how an article about photography wandered into nostalgia, rural folklore, and a sincere warning about pits of death: abandoned places are never only scenery to the people who knew them.

We do not hate barn or silo photography. We respect barns. We distrust silos. Both have earned that response through combat.

A barn arrives with memory, labor, weather, isolation, family history, and decay already attached. That makes it powerful, but the photographer must do more than prove it was present. A strong barn photograph uses light, land, repairs, and human traces to give us a specific place rather than the general idea of one.

We have seen exceptional barn photographs. We have also seen many whose complete argument is: “There was a barn, and I found it.”

That is field documentation. It is not always a finished photograph.

Please share your barns and silos. We are not discouraging you. We are challenging you.

If you are new to the subject or to submitting work, message us. We would rather help you make a stronger photograph than watch a hashtag become a permission slip.

Show us the barn whose provenance survives where the building records do not. Show us the repair that became part of the architecture, the family history that outlived the family, or the rural ruin that says something more than “rural ruin.” Make us stop seeing barns as a category and start seeing yours as a place.

The higher standard is not disdain. It is respect. We believe in your barn. We are keeping an eye on your silo.

Just stay out of the grain bin.