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Silent Workplace: Stores, shops, businesses, and factories where Hoosiers once earned a living

PHOTOGRAPHY by John Bower, FOREWORD by Gayle and Bill Cook

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Read Gayle and Bill Cook's Foreword.
Read John Bower's Introduction.
Read John Bower's Afterword.
Look at sample images.

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, 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.

Silent Workplace contains 186 images from across the entire state of Indiana, and includes fascinating essays on over a dozen businesses that are now part of our Hoosier past.

The project description and philosophy

When introducing ourselves, most of us mention what we do for a living. It's expected in our culture, because our jobs are an integral part of who we are. So, for this particular book, I pointed my camera at former workplaces—some closed for decades, others for just a short time. These are the factories, shops, offices, and stores where Hoosiers once toiled, sometimes happily, sometimes enduringly—then walked away from, and left behind.

Most of the commercial buildings I've documented hearken back to an era before computers, bar codes, the Internet, and email. It was a time when grain was milled locally, real home-cooked meals were served at Main Street diners, and penny candy was a staple at the corner drug store. Typewriters were in use, steam power was common, and the wood floors in the dime store creaked. Big-box stores weren't even a dream yet, and franchises were the exception rather than the rule.

From one-room stores, to sprawling factories, Silent Workplace is a tribute to all these forgotten businesses, where so many Hoosiers once worked.

Silent Workplace - $22.00
8.5" x 10" trade paperback, 144 pages, ISBN 978-0-9745186-4-0