Georgia Magazine - June 2023 - 17

insatiable appetite to learn more about the buildings he encounters.
" I look forward to visitors commenting about the structures
[I feature] or sharing a story from their past. "
In 2008, Brown launched what is now the Vanishing
Georgia website, which archives more than 27,000 of his
photographs from more than 8,000 locations around the state-
at least one image from all 159 Georgia counties-along with the
bits of history Brown and his followers piece together.
He's captured images and stories involving leaning shacks
that are being pulled to the ground by kudzu vines, mills that
have been out of commission for decades and one-room
schoolhouses with heart-pine façades and boarded-up
windows. The project is a testament to his passion for
exploring Georgia's rural areas and ghost towns and preserving
places before they disappear forever.
A paradise lost
Brown was born and raised in Fitzgerald in south-central
Georgia. The vanishing of his family's agricultural heritage
fueled his mission of collecting images and histories.
" I lived in Atlanta for a while, and when I returned home
for a visit, a farmhouse and a tobacco barn near my family's
farm were gone, " he says.
One had collapsed on its own. The other had been
bulldozed. In Brown's mind, these buildings were essential
to depicting the area's agrarian lifestyle, and he felt a sense of
urgency to do something to record as many of these structures
as possible.
By 1998, he was roaming the countryside near his hometown
and photographing vernacular architecture, a modest style
of building that incorporates local materials, knowledge and
labor. Ten years later, Brown launched Vanishing South Georgia,
the first iteration of his extensive photographic archive.
Two years into the project, Brown expanded his project
to reach into all corners of Georgia. Vanishing South Georgia
became Vanishing Georgia, a statewide effort that grew out of a
sense of duty to future generations that won't have memories or
passed-down stories to help them understand the past.
" That need persists to the present day, perhaps now more
than ever, " he says. " I think with Georgia's agricultural history
and its continued dominance in our economy, it's important
for people to see tangible evidence of the change that's been
brought on by mechanization. "
Old tenant houses and sharecropper shacks are among his
favorite places to document.
" [They] illustrate just how much of a labor force was
necessary to make a living at farming before modern equipment
came along and how hard life could be back then, " he says.
" Whole communities once depended on these operations, and
they're all just memories and names on maps today. "
A snapshot in time
In 2012, a stranger left a comment on the website that got
Brown's attention. The woman had shared Brown's photo of an
old Jefferson County sharecropper's house with her mother.
" My mother lived in that house, which was rented from the
MORE
Brian Brown's Vanishing Georgia website archives more than 27,000 of
his photographs from more than 8,000 locations around the state-at least one
image from all 159 Georgia counties.
Construction of the Gordon-Lee Mansion in Chickamauga began in
1840 and was not completed until 1847.
Brown photographed two rare Victorian grave shelters at Mount Hope
Methodist Church Cemetery in Hancock County in 2010. They are no
longer standing.
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Georgia Magazine - June 2023

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