Click image for larger view
Time-lapse photography has done wonders for capturing the feverish pace of development in our contemporary age, showing cities built at incredible speeds as day turns into night and back again and frantic swarms of people zip in and out of the frame. The demise of cities, however, is rarely the focus of this photographic technique. It takes a dedicated photographer to document a fast fading memory. When photographer Franz Jantzen heard about the coal company buyout of the small town of Cheshire, Ohio back in 2002, he paid the town a visit.
According to NPR, the events leading up to the buyout began in the summer of 2001, when the American Electric Power plant installed new emissions control equipment that began sending blue clouds of sulfuric acid into neighboring Cheshire. The sulfuric acid—along with the more accustomed heavy dose of smog—began inciting allergic-like reactions, headaches and chemical burns to those exposed. After a slew of complaints, American Electric Power offered to buy out the small town in 2002, and its residents agreed to sell. So began the gradual dismantling of Cheshire, Ohio.
Jantzen found himself snapping photographs of “a bucolic little town” in 2002, when residents of Cheshire were preparing to vacate their homes. He returned a year later, then two years later, and finally seven years later, to photograph the exact same spots in town.
“A year after my visit—that was the strangest because the houses had not been torn down yet but everybody had moved out. … It was like a ghost town,” Jantzen tells NPR. The photo series reveal an eerie sequence of events, as cars, trees, and then entire houses disappear from the frames, and neighborhood haunts are entirely smoothed over with flat, manicured lawns meant to offset the industrial hard edge of American Electric’s smokestacks. “It was an odd sensation to see something change so quickly,” Jantzen says.
Today, the plant stands as a reminder of a town that once was. But with the coal industry facing new opposition—particularly a prospective new bill barring the construction of new coal-fueled power plants—there is a chance that Cheshire’s vastly altered landscape may change again.
[All photos courtesy the artist]
more
