An esthetic record of disappearing architecture in North Louisiana.

Photographers usually snap the shutter hoping to record an icon, but commonplace subjects are usually ignored, until one day we discover that they are no longer there. Fortunately, noted photographer Lee Estes, a Kentucky native, has captured on film many once ordinary Louisiana sights that have not weathered the test of time.

These images�fading textures�were exposed over a period of more than four decades. The earliest photographs were taken because of the photographer's fascination with his adopted home state.

Things common to Louisiana natives were fascinating to Estes, and, fortunately for posterity, the photographer's fascination resulted in the creation of one of the most beautiful and historically important visual records ever produced in Louisiana. Subjects range from paper and sawmill towns to natural gas compressor stations, cotton gins, train depots, plantation quarters, country stores, rural and urban churches, business districts, steamboats, locomotives, trucks, gas stations, drive-in theaters, beautiful Victorian mansions, modest backstreet cottages, log cabins, barns, warehouses, urban business districts, streetscapes, lanscapes, and the people who make northeastern Louisiana distinctive.

The beauty of Estes' photographs transcends time and place, and the power and the drama of his imagery will touch everyone who reads the book. As Michael Sartisky, president of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, has noted: "Lee Estes' primary focus is the graceful salvage of the past, the documentation of those artifacts of human creation which connect us most deeply to how people lived and worked before they are lost to the onslaught of modernity and the erosion of memory. His photographs frame the essence of those things which lead us to the present moment so that in looking backward we can look forward and perhaps leam to cherish what we too have wrought."

This work is sure to become a classic. Order your copy today.

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