American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape

Minnesota native Maxwell MacKenzie understands the romance of an abandoned farmhouse, weeds massing around its ragged perimeters like troops preparing for a final assault. A commercial photographer, MacKenzie spends weekends driving through Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas, searching for abandoned homesteads, hoping to get there before fire department classes wipe out their last vestiges. "America has decay, but it's short on ruin," a sage once intoned. Astonishingly, mysteriously evocative, American Ruins corrects that deficiency.