March 8, 2026

Home Ground #38
Bozeman, Montana
2026

I’ve photographed this outbuilding before but not in the context of this series of images I don’t think. Plus I liked the lighting in this shot, making it worthy of a repeat.

This is the first outbuilding we built after we’d started building our house in the mountains. It was built primarily of used lumber acquired at a farm auction. The window and door came from the old Anaconda copper mine in Anaconda, Montana. The building serves primarily as a tool shed for gardening etc. Since I’ve always liked photographing old buildings, I built this one to look old from the beginning and let it weather from there.

It seems a bit of a tradition in Montana, and elsewhere I assume, to throw found skulls and other bones on the roofs of sheds or barns or even houses. So I started doing that here many years ago. I haven’t added anything in recent years though. There used to be a lot more on the roof of this shed but between high winds, critters, and general ageing and deterioration of the bone material itself, there is not much left.