The Inhabitants was published by Scribner’s in 1946. It is the first of Morris’s photo-text books — works that combine his photographs (taken with a Rolleiflex on extended road trips across America) with prose passages that are not captions but parallel meditations. The photographs show buildings: barns, houses, churches, storefronts, mostly on the Great Plains, often abandoned or in states of beautiful decay.
Morris’s photographs are remarkable: sharp, frontal, unglamorous, showing the structures straight on without dramatic angles or atmospheric effects. They derive from the documentary tradition (Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange) but are more abstract — Morris is interested in form and surface rather than social condition. The buildings become portraits of the people who built them, used them, and left them: the absent inhabitants whose presence is felt in every worn threshold and faded sign.
The prose passages — printed on the pages facing the photographs — are not descriptions of the images but independent compositions on related themes: place, memory, the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit, the American impulse to build and move on. The book inaugurated a form that Morris would develop in The Home Place and God’s Country and My People — a genuinely new synthesis of word and image.
Collecting The Inhabitants
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1946): Cloth with dust jacket, illustrated with photographs.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Morris’s pioneering photo-text work.
The Photo-Text Book
The Inhabitants (1946) pairs Morris’s photographs of Great Plains buildings — farmhouses, barns, churches, grain elevators — with prose passages that give voice to the people who lived in them. The photographs are documentary but also deeply aesthetic: Morris’s eye for the geometry of Plains architecture and the quality of light on weathered wood anticipated the New Topographics movement by decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Morris a photographer as well as a writer? Yes. Morris was a serious art photographer whose work is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, and other major collections. His photographs of Great Plains buildings and artifacts are among the most important documentary images of rural America.