In August of '06 documentary photographer Gaston Callum journeyed to the heart of the Deep South to photograph some of the region's most endangered historic buildings. Over a three week period fifty-two antebellum plantation houses, quarters, and churchs were recorded by Callum from South Carolina to Louisiana. The endangered status of the fifty-two buildings results from the fact that most of the homes are currently residing uninhabited and unmaintained — a condition that is proving to be a lethal combination for idle Southern farmhouses. A large percentage of the recorded buildings illustrate that many of them are suffering from both short and long-term decay, and that many will not likely survive into the future unless rescue efforts are initiated very soon. But the news was not all bad, and one of the most uplifting stories of Callum's trip was visiting Hollywood Plantation in Mississippi which is currently undergoing a thorough restoration by its longtime owner.

Gaston Callum founded Southland Historic Preservation in 1997 and today serves as the organization's executive director. Callum's main purpose for reconnoitering the Deep South this year was to photograph specific endangered properties for SHP's ongoing photographic inventory of early Southern architecture. This documentation effort focuses on early farm and plantation houses that are disappearing from the Southern landscape in mass numbers each year with no apparent end in sight.

Two years in the making, the Deep South photo trek was SHP's most ambitiously produced reconnaissance effort to date. After months researching and identifying significant candidates to record, the second phase of the effort entailed opening lines of communication with property owners to request access to their property. As one can imagine, most endangered property owners are not usually enthusiastic about having their neglected historic structures thoroughly photographed by a preservation group whose eventual intention is to publish the pictures into book form. Realizing this, SHP makes every effort to initiate sincere and friendly dialogue with property owners as a way to establish an effective means of communication with them. By mid summer most of the trip's itinerary had been ironed out and in the pre-dawn hours of July 22nd Callum began weaving an intricate path through the former land of cotton. Once in the field, physically locating the precise location of the isolated buildings takes on a special quality all its own, especially in mid-summer when the heat is on and the vegetation consumes abandoned farmsteads like they were deep-fried jumbo shrimp. And since driving to the front doorsteps of these old farmsteads is not always an option, Callum pretty much knew the drill and found himself regularly packing in his equipment and hiking across fields and dense woods to get up close and personal with the subjects.