Whether we like it or not, planned communities and multi-family condos are becoming the future of the American landscape. Vanishing are the rural houses and the vast stretches of farmland – the McMansion has arrived to replace such quaint lifestyles. Documenting this loss is photographer Anne Rowland, whose exhibit Private Property at Hemphill Fine Arts, is a rush of nostalgia for her childhood home and an era that seems to be coming to a close.

Rowland visits decaying farmhouses, old sycamore groves, and other scenes that suffer from destruction or abandonment, and takes thousands of shots with a large format camera. She then scans the pictures and cuts each one into pieces, digitally pasting the sections back together to create a broken image of what once was or is slowly fading away. In Teardown, a bulldozer is in mid-crush of a large, rural farmhouse. Rowland marks in neat cursive on the photo, “Old house being torn down so new owner can build larger house.” Though the equipment is halted in the frame, the jagged patchwork of images shows us the fate of the house, decided as soon as the new owners chose to stretch the boundaries of their suburb into the countryside.

In The Kitchen (pictured), Rowland captures the abandoned home that still reverberates echoes of the simple family life. The misaligned images make the kitchen tiles run every which way, drawing the eye to every corner of the crumbling room. She labels each drawer, closet, and cabinet door hanging askew off one hinge with the contents it used to hold. Pots, pans and spices all once had their place in this room, but no more, just as the family members and their way of life were removed long ago.

Deeper in the gallery one finds Rowland’s large, wall-sized prints, which focus more on the surrounding rural landscape. The use of altered images becomes more poignant here. Not only are the pieces of each photograph taken from just slightly different angles, creating that damaged look, but each one is also taken with a different focal point. Half of a branch of the Tree Covered in Poison Ivy is so crisp you count the cracks in the bark, while the other half is so blurry you can hardly tell the bark from the leaves. Rowland brilliantly captures a childhood memory that is simultaneously so clear one can still remember the touch of the old climbing tree, and yet is fading away so fast it will soon cease to exist in both memory and reality.

Hemphill Fine Arts is located at 1515 14th Street, NW, and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm. Private Property closes this Saturday, April 22.