Silent Workplace: Shops, Stores, Businesses, and Factories Where Hoosiers Once Earned a Living - Tapa blanda

As our retail environment is increasingly dominated by shopping malls and big-box stores, Silent Workplace pays homage to the abandoned general stores and small-town shops which did not survive. It also captures the dignity of defunct factories, mills, and other workplaces that are no more. Bower has focused his camera on businesses closed up for nearly a 100 years, as well as those that have ceased to be more recently. There are moving portraits of a leather tannery, furniture factories, an ancient projector in a former theater, banks, barber shops, root-beer stands, a dress factory—even an undertaker's shop. The book contains 186 stunning photographs by Hoosier photographer John Bower.

A beauty parlor, a tannery, a hotel, drive-in restaurants, a foundry, a tavern, banks, factories, and general stores. In this stunning collection, Hoosier photographer John Bower has captured once-thriving Indiana businesses that are no more. Exploring cities, small towns, and rural county roads, he's found closed-up buildings in varying states of preservation—some virtual time capsules (right), others ready to collapse. Bower uses the beauty and power of black-and-white to capture the essence of these places where our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends once earned their living.