Opening Reception - Vanishing Dallas: Architectural Preservation by Five Photographers

Dallas is epic in scope, and one of the most important cities in the United States. But through the years, the city’s old buildings began to decay. Sometimes they were restored, sometimes revered, but more often torn down and replaced. Beginning in 2011, five fine art photographers decided to explore our “Vanishing Dallas” and set their cameras to record some of the most beautiful and frustratingly endangered buildings in our city. With the instruction of photographer Carolyn Brown and in collaboration with Preservation Dallas, the results are emotional and thought provoking. These images appeal to the senses—they bring life to buildings and infrastructure possibly left to die.

Architecture is a language to be deciphered, explored, and analyzed. It lies all around us. It veils intriguing secret tales to be grasped by the observant. Interweaving architecture, preservation, and fine art photography, the Vanishing Dallas exhibition is a call to explore, divine the incomprehensible, and bring it home in your heart before these structures testaments to an earlier time disappear without a trace.

The photographers are Lyndall Dyer, Bob Johnson, Gary Skotnicki, Nelson Spencer, and Alan Whiteside. They come to this project with varied backgrounds in publishing, architecture, real estate, history, education, theology and art, as well as photography.

Information from venue