Abandoned Oklahoma: Pieces of Our Past

A series of photographs capturing the forgotten beauty of Oklahoma.

As a kid growing up in small town Iowa, author and photographer Stephanie Bishop visited her grandparents three hours away, in even smaller town in Iowa. Every trip, her dad would try to take a new route using Iowa’s backroads. She loved watching the world go by through that dusty, bug splattered windshield. Passing farm after farm, she wondered what life was like in those big, old, rambling farmhouses. Many small towns have a collection of run down, dilapidated buildings, causing one to imagine what life was like in livelier times.

Many of those old treasures are gone or have crumbled beyond recognition. The ones that remain, ghosts of their former selves, are fair game for Stephanie’s camera lens. Even though she has traded Iowa’s rich black soil for Oklahoma’s red dirt roads, she still takes the backroads searching for old, dusty, abandoned buildings that time has forgotten. Abandoned Oklahoma aims to preserve the crumbling pieces of our past so new generations can indefinitely explore and enjoy these locations, if only by turning the pages.