47/365: White's Furniture

Another thing that HDR does very well is texture. Decaying things, rusting things, metal and wooden things, all get nice and textural, and textury-looking. On the way to the grocery store for Chimay and other effects for the evening's dinner, I stopped at the decrepit White's Furniture building in Mebane, once a fully-functioning American factory, now nothing at all. They plan on making apartments out of the building, but before they do, I need to get in there and shoot the hell out of it in all it's composting glory.

The furniture warhouse sits right in the middle of downtown Mebane, NC. The railroad tracks run right past, but the trains don't stop here anymore.

 The factory was locally-owned for something like 100 years, but in the 1990's it was bought by a large corporation, and then went out of business not too long after. A local photographer (he lives a block away from the warehouse), Bill Bamberger, documented the swan song of the building in a great book, Closing, co-authored with Cathy N. Davidson. The book provides a lot of insight into what the closing of such a place, the main economic heart of such a town, can do to the people and area (here's a hint, it ain't a good thing).

As I left the railroad tracks I was shooting on, I found a small treasure. Rusty, but pretty. Kinda like the old warehouse. I'm a sucker for old, dead stuff...

-LLG