Artist Statement

Barns were never meant to be monuments. They were built to work.
They held animals, machinery, feed, tools, wagons, and harvests. Their doors opened every morning because something needed to be done. Over time, many were abandoned, altered, repurposed, or simply left to weather.

In The Last Barns, I photograph these structures as individual portraits.

I remove the roads, trees, fences, and other distractions that normally surround them and place each structure alone on an open, dry plain beneath a muted sky. By separating the building from its familiar landscape, I ask the viewer to look again at its shape, materials, scars, and architecture.

Some of these barns are carefully maintained. Others are collapsing. Paint peels away. Roofs sag. Metal rusts.

Doors hang open. Machinery remains where it was once used. Occasionally an animal, a chair, a wagon, or an abandoned piece of equipment provides evidence of the life that once surrounded these buildings.

I am especially interested in structures that are easily overlooked—the potato barn, feed barn, stable, equipment shed, and agricultural buildings that were designed for usefulness rather than beauty.

These photographs are not intended as nostalgia. They are portraits of working architecture and the passage of time.

The people who built these structures may be gone. The work they performed may have disappeared. But the buildings remain, carrying their history in wood, stone, metal, paint, and rust.

— Michael Domino
Port Jefferson, New York