Marisa Scheinfeld > Quotes

“In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98TH Meridian - where it sometimes rain and it sometimes doesn’t – towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate, the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place – now that is dead – had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied.

Reproduced in THE BORSCHT BELT from The Works of Love by Wright Morris by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1949, 1951 by Wright Morris.”
― Marisa Scheinfeld, The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland

“I truly feel there is a sense of a new life, a movement and presence in the photographs,
and while bittersweet, and at times seemingly even apocalyptic, I think it’s phenomenal,” says Scheinfeld. “While photographing a lot of these [hotels],
I’d walk in and feel disturbed by the way they looked and their conditions. But I’d also be absorbed and amazed. There was a tragedy and awe going on at the same
time.”
― Marisa Scheinfeld