Ever since my first trip past the huge old stucco dairy barn on the lower campus road back in the 1970’s, I have frequently paused to admire the building.I swear I can remember cows crossing Commonwealth Avenue to the pasture that is now the site of the Mullins Center. I surely remember it in use, and then, over the past decades more or less abandoned, the vines growing thicker up the walls, the roof slates spotty.

Once a central fixture of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the barn was built in 1907, then rebuilt after a fire in 1908. The old M.A.C. barn was recently demolished to make way for a new recreation center. When I was a grad student in photography at the university, I had a studio in the nearly Milker’s Bungalow, where the fellows who got up early to milk the herd once bunked. It’s gone now too.

(Click thumbnails to see enlargements)

One thing that always struck me about the place was its resemblance to the scene depicted in the earliest existing photographic image from a camera, Joseph Nicephore Niepce’s “View out the Window” of his country estate in St-Loup-de-Varennes, France from ’round about 1826. In particular, it was the north silo of the barn, that was so like in architectural style to the towers in Niepce’s view (like the M.A.C. Barn, those outbuildings are now also gone, although Niepce’s house still stands).

Niepce’s story is not an entirely happy one. He and his brother went broke hankering after inventions (“heliography” being but one effort). His now famous view pictures a heavily mortgaged estate. Niepce died shortly after the photo was achieved, after which his sometime-partner Daguerre inherited the technical processes and the fame for its invention, later dubbed “the Daguerreotype.”

When I saw the demolition of the barn underway, I thought to make an image in homage to both the barn as a symbol of our fading legacy of agriculture here in Western Massachusetts, and to Niepce. It seems appropriate… time slips away, memory & loss are the soul of photography.

(Click thumbnails to see enlargements)

Nicephore Niepce’s “View out the window” reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. My own photo, all rights reserved, © Michele Turre.

More on the barn: Photos of bygone days at the dairy barn can be found in the University Archives Special Collections:

• Labelled 1918
• Undated photo of cows in the barnyard
• Postcard: When the barn was new
• Milkers Bunglaow, foreground

Read a Memoir of a Barn in the UMass Alumni Magazine.

Niepce’s “photo” pictured here is actually a reproduction on paper, touched up with watercolor.See what the original polished pewter plate really looked liked at the University of Texas Austin’s site.

You can also see a short video about the restoration of Niepce’s home produced by the Spéos Paris Photographic Institute.