The Arkansas Delta is a landscape continually in flux, made and remade, often violently, by earthly and human forces. What was, for millennia, an expansive forest of cypress, tupelo, pine, oak, and persimmon, and a complex system of rivers, swamps, and upland prairies, is today a largely rationalized landscape of rice and cotton fields, dewatered through a 5,000-mile network of drainage ditches and canals, and harvested by massive, chaff-spewing machines. 1 Dotted with towns still often (informally) segregated by race, where historic buildings succumb to planned demolitions to avoid the liabilities of unplanned ones, the region embodies, and in many ways magnifies, the paradoxes of a century of American “progress.”

Waldenburg, Arkansas. A discarded semi-trailer sits by the roadside, its side branded with faded yellow letters: “WAL ART,” the missing M obscured by the open door. A small air-conditioning unit sits on DIY supports, and inside, I can just make out what appears to be a person’s belongings. My eye travels to an overturned blue vinyl loveseat in the foreground, and I wonder if the makeshift domicile was still occupied at the time of the photograph; or if, like so much of the Arkansas Delta, it too had been abandoned.

The Arkansas Delta is a landscape continually in flux, made and remade, often violently, by earthly and human forces.

Comprising a 250-mile-long swath of the state and including portions of 15 counties, the Arkansas Delta is part of the larger Mississippi Delta, with which it shares a good deal of history and culture. The late historian Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. wrote that this extensive landscape is “to an extraordinary degree [a microcosm of the] distinctive environment, behavior, and historical experience of the South.” 2 Yet it is also a place in-between, southerly but not the Deep South, an expanse of prairie grasses but not the Plains. Even among Arkansans, the delta is often unseen. On my first visit several years ago, accompanying a group of outdoor enthusiasts on a float trip down Bayou deView, there was collective surprise at the striking differences between the eastern and western parts of the state. To the east was a land of moody swamps and murky rivers, flooded rice fields and dark green minnow ponds, their banks colonized by egrets and cormorants. Small towns where you could still find perfectly perforated muss

Human boundaries are rarely sufficient for understanding landscapes, and the geology of Arkansas offers a hint, a rationale, a “geo-logic” for this dissociation. The state is divided roughly into two halves by the edges of the Ozark Plateau and the Ouachita Mountains, which together stretch from the northeast corner of the state to where it meets Texas and Oklahoma. To the west, a wide, flat, once-timbered alluvial plain; to the east, the scenic rivers and lakes of still-wooded mountains. It makes one wonder why so often we view our waterways as dividing lines, when culturally the Mississippi River is more a unifier, extending its influence on the landscape and its inhabitants equally in both directions.

The region embodies, and in many ways magnifies, the paradoxes of a century of American ‘progress.

For Arkansans, the geographic and conceptual line through the middle of the state is the starker and arguably more apt boundary. As I crossed that threshold on my way from Fayetteville to Bayou deView on that first visit, it felt as if time and space had accordioned out, as if the distances traveled were much greater than 250 miles and a few short hours in a car. Later, retracing my route on Google Maps, my sense of temporal dislocation was only heightened. Toggling to StreetView, I was confronted by grainy, low-resolution images of small towns — Elaine, McCrory, Augusta, Geridge — that belied their digital nature. The views carried timestamps: 2007. 2008. 2009. A decade and a half has elapsed since these towns were recorded by Google’s car-mounted cameras, enough time for a child to attend their first day of kindergarten, graduate from high school, and move away.

Our digital infrastructures mirror society’s general withdrawal from places like the Arkansas Delta, but they also compound it. Whatever had occurred in this place in the past 15 years — further abandonment, triumphal renaissance, or something in between — was known only to those who had witnessed it firsthand.

I am interested in both the old barn and the new kind of farming, for they tell different, yet interconnected, stories. This may be a partial explanation for my interest in the photography of Tim Hursley, whose palimpsestic images of decaying storefronts and Muskogee houses and the strange calligraphy produced by rice cultivation speak to the changing landscape of the Arkansas Delta, to conditions of economic abandonment and human persistence in the face of it.

Hursley is better known for his architectural work. He has photographed buildings by John Portman, I.M. Pei, Antoine Predock, and Marlon Blackwell, among many others. He has also been, for the past 30 years, the documentarian of Auburn University’s Rural Studio, a gig that takes him regularly from his home base of Little Rock, Arkansas, through the Mississippi Delta to Hale County, Alabama. But beginning about five years ago, and particularly amid the pandemic, Hursley began turning his attention to the abandoned streetscapes and agri-industrial ruins in his own backyard.

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