Through the Magpie Eye: Wright Morris

22.04.2015

Wright Morris photograph of a weathered timber barn, a pointed opening in its gable above an open doorway, by a bare tree

Born in 1910, Wright Morris was a man who took a lot of good photographs of old American buildings. This is probably selling him a bit short, as he also wrote loads of novels and short stories and things like that, but for the sake of this quickly hashed-out blog-blast, let’s just talk about his nice pictures shall we?

Not one for fancy gimmickry, his pictures are straight up, straight on shots of the sorts of buildings where people with names like Wyatt or Emmett might live with a few scrawny hens and a lame old mare that should have been put out to pasture years ago.

If you’re into this stuff then you’d probably like Wright's 1946 half-photo, half-story book, The Inhabitants.

Plain white clapboard house with dark windows standing in wind-rippled drifts, a hollow tree stump to one side

Shingled house with a ragged, broken roof and two chimneys in long grass, a telegraph pole on the hill behind

White clapboard building with a square bell tower, two front doors and rows of small-pane windows

Narrow clapboard house with a steep gable, a single upper window and a plain door, on bare flat ground

White clapboard cottage with boarded-up windows either side of a panelled door, under a shingled roof with two chimneys

Tall white grain elevator with GANO painted near the top, railway wagons behind and a wire fence in front

Weathered wooden grain elevator beside a lone street lamp on a bare corner, small sheds around it

White clapboard church with a square tower and pointed windows beside a plain house on a dirt road, patches of snow

Plain white clapboard house with dark windows standing in wind-rippled drifts, a hollow tree stump to one side

Plain white clapboard shopfronts along a wide empty street, a single street lamp on the kerb

Side of a white clapboard house with one tall window and a porch, a hand pump by the wall and leaves on the ground

Lone timber house with a snow-covered roof and a single window, standing in a flat, empty snowfield

Wooden church with a tall spire and arched windows beside a telegraph pole and a two-storey house with bay windows

Two-storey building with a fretwork balcony and a round window in the gable, a rusting car wreck beside it

Timber shed with a tall chimney stack held up by wires beside a lone palm tree, railway tracks running in front

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