Thank you, thank you to Jason Irwin, who kicks off a series of guest posts at Rust Belt Girl, and to you, for being here! What is a Rust Belt place–and who defines the perameters? What does post-industrial mean today? What are a place’s histories, characteristics, and quirks–and how have they shaped its people and its art? How have they shaped the stories we tell, and what have those stories meant for Grit Lit and Rural Noir writing and for other mediums of creative expression? For this series, I suspect we will get some fascinating answers to these questions and many more I haven’t thought of.

A guest post by Jason Irwin

Though I have used film in the past, as well as digital cameras, I consider myself an amateur. I owned a flip phone for 22 years but finally gave in and bought a smart phone during the summer of 2024. Do I love my smart phone? Well, no, but it makes life easier, and I do love the camera feature.

I believe my photos are already out there waiting for me to stumble upon. I like taking photos of people naturally, most often without them knowing I’m taking their photos. I prefer them off-center. I also like wide-open, desolate landscapes and cityscapes: derelict, sometimes abandoned buildings, windows, doorways, big skies, fields, and bodies of water. My hometown of Dunkirk, New York, is a perfect place for such photos. I hope the three photos in this post show this. 

Serendipity, the storefront boutique in Madison, Indiana, looked lost in time to me, as my wife and I drove past. Maybe not in the 50s but still lost in time. Using the grayscale setting on my Samsung smartphone ads to the notion that this photo is older than it appears. Madison is her hometown, or rather Deputy, an unincorporated rural community about 18 miles northwest of Madison. Just outside the borders of what the Britannica website’s map marks as the Rust Belt. Madison was first settled in 1805, five years before my hometown of Dunkirk. Though not a Rust Belt town, Madison, like Dunkirk, was once a railroad town. The Madison and Indianapolis Railroad was completed in 1836. The first train stopped in Dunkirk on May 15, 1851, and at the time it was the last stop on the New York and Erie Railroad. 

I chose color for the photo of the old Regent movie theater, which closed in the late 1980s, but still stands, minus its marquee, on the corner of Washington Avenue and Third Street in Dunkirk, because of the recent addition of the mural, which pays homage to Dunkirk’s Hispanic and African American communities. As a child I went to the Regent, owned by Mr. Burget and his sad-eyed basset hound, to see movies like Back to the Future, E.T., and Rocky II. Many nights my mother would have a craving for popcorn, and she’d park our car out front and send me in to the concession stand to buy a large tub with extra salt and butter and then we’d go home and eat it while watching TV.

The harbor in Barcelona, New York (a former fishing hamlet a few miles north of the village of Westfield), was where one of the scenes from the 2020 movie A Quiet Place Part II staring Cillian Murphy was filmed. Besides its huge commercial fishing industry that died out in the 1970s, the area is home to various wineries and agriculture, including Welch’s Grape Juice. Just out of frame to the left, up a small hill sits the Barcelona Lighthouse. Built in 1829, it is the first gas-powered lighthouse in the world. My father was born next door in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage in 1941. The grayscale setting gives this photo an eerie presence, but I love how the trees reflect in the water.

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