A few weekends ago, my son and I attended the Institute for Contemporary Photography’s (ICP) annual Photobook Fair in New York City. It was a marvelous event, a gathering of publishers, artists, and enthusiasts who treat the photobook as an art form in its own right. The atmosphere was electric: tables overflowing with new releases, photographers standing by to talk about their projects, and visitors lingering over books with reverence. My son darted between tables, pointing out covers that caught his eye, while I moved more slowly, taking in the range.
Then one book stopped me. On its cover was a familiar but uncanny sight: a stone façade with Corinthian columns, once the face of a bank, now branded with the cheap vinyl banners of a “Famous Brands Fashion Outlet.” The building’s solidity had not disappeared - the columns still stood, the stone was still heavy - but its meaning had changed. Above it, an elevated train track threw the façade into shadow, literally overshadowing its former grandeur.
This was Michael Vahrenwald’s The People’s Trust, a collection of photographs of America’s former banks. The book’s premise is deceptively simple: to show us the architectural shells of financial institutions, many now abandoned, reoccupied, or awkwardly repurposed. Yet the effect is profound. These façades were designed to embody permanence, to project trust in stone. Now they survive their institutions, standing as masks whose promises no longer persuade but whose presence still haunts the street.
The photographs are accompanied by an essay from Wolfgang Scheppe, whose text gives intellectual depth to the images. Where Vahrenwald is calm, frontal, and almost forensic, Scheppe is historical and urgent. He insists that façades are rhetoric. They are not neutral shells, but instruments of persuasion, built to mask fragility, to project stability, to convince depositors that abstract financial systems were as durable as marble columns. Together, text and image reveal façades not simply as ruins but as witnesses: to ambition, collapse, and uneasy transformation.
Façades as Masks
American banks, Scheppe argues, adopted the same strategy. From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth, banks covered themselves in neoclassical dress. Doric columns, heavy entablatures, and carved pediments did not merely decorate; they persuaded. They made finance visible as stone, masking volatility with marble. To deposit one’s savings was to believe in the mask.
The cover photograph of The People’s Trust captures this perfectly. The mask is still intact, the columns still dignified. But the “Fashion Outlet” banners mock that dignity, and the elevated train above throws the entire edifice into shadow. The building continues to perform, but the play has changed.
The Scenery of Stability
Scheppe calls this architecture the “scenery of stability.” Banks repeated neoclassical formulas because repetition itself created reassurance. A columned façade in a small Midwestern town mirrored one in New York, Baltimore, Boston, or Philadelphia, offering the comfort of familiarity. Stability had to be staged to be believed.
Vahrenwald photographs these façades square-on, stripped of angles and shadows, denying us easy drama. The images are clinical, but this neutrality makes their absurdities visible.
One photograph shows a monumental Art Deco bank entrance, its geometric details still intact. Yet within its vast frame sits a lone ATM kiosk, absurdly small and provisional. Grandeur has shrunk into banality, the performance of permanence reduced to a machine spitting receipts.
Another image depicts a modest neoclassical branch crowned by a neon sign spelling “Latino” in cheerful red and green. The stone façade still strains toward gravitas, but the neon overwrites it with improvisation. The new sign does not erase the old rhetoric of stability; it perches atop it, turning dignity into irony.
Elsewhere, a foggy photograph shows the carved inscription “Dollar Savings Bank” barely legible through mist. Here permanence appears spectral, as though even stone is evaporating.
And in yet another, a pillared façade now advertises a pharmacy. The columns still assert monumentality, but their function has shifted from finance to prescriptions. The scenery of stability has become the scenery of improvisation.
These images are not nostalgic, nor are they ruin porn. They are documents of survival and estrangement. The façades are not gone, but their meanings have migrated.
Absolutism and After
Scheppe presses the argument further. By the mid-twentieth century, façades had become absolutist rhetoric. Banks built monumental structures not simply to reassure but to dominate visually. These were not just neighborhood branches; they were architectural propaganda for finance itself.
Yet this absolutism contained its undoing. As finance globalized, digitized, and became more abstract, façades grew untethered from reality. Trust no longer resided in marble. It resided in algorithms and electronic transfers. Stone, however monumental, could no longer persuade.
Vahrenwald photographs what remains after that break. Façades that once embodied permanence are now abandoned, repurposed, or absurdly rebranded. Their rhetoric lingers, but hollowed. They endure, but their authority is gone.
A Sequence of Images
The power of The People’s Trust lies not just in individual images but in their sequence. Vahrenwald moves us from dignity mocked (the cover, with its “Fashion Outlet” banners), to dignity shrunk (the ATM kiosk swallowed in stone), to dignity overwritten (the neon “Latino” sign), to dignity ghosted (the mist-shrouded Dollar Savings Bank), to dignity repurposed (the pharmacy behind classical columns).
Seen together, the sequence mirrors the erosion of civic trust itself. Stability is not destroyed in a single act; it frays, is mocked, is overwritten, is forgotten, is rebranded. The façades narrate the slow drama of confidence lost.
Civic Stakes
This is where the project transcends art into civic reflection. The façades are not just architecture; they are barometers of trust. When banks were built with stone columns, they declared themselves permanent parts of civic life. They echoed the courthouses, libraries, and post offices of the same era; institutions built to embody continuity.
Today, those institutions are frayed. Confidence in banks, government, media, and even higher education has cratered. Poll after poll shows Americans doubting institutions that once bound communities together. The façades in Vahrenwald’s book become visual allegories for that decline. They remind us that civic trust, like stone, can weather storms but not remain unscarred.
This is why the book resonated so deeply with me at the Photobook Fair, and why it spoke to my son as well. For him, these façades do not automatically command respect. To a younger generation, permanence is suspect. Authority must be earned, not assumed. Walking home, we pointed out façades on nearby buildings, noticing how many bore the scars of changed use. Where I once saw permanence, he saw improvisation. His view was not cynical but realistic: permanence is always provisional.
What Replaces Façades?
The question, of course, is what comes next. If banks once staged trust in stone, what institutions build our scenery of stability today? Do we still construct anything that embodies civic permanence?
Perhaps our equivalents are digital: data centers, server farms, algorithmic systems that process transactions invisibly. But these architectures inspire no confidence; they are hidden, anonymous, placeless. Or perhaps permanence has migrated to other monumental forms: stadiums, luxury condos, corporate headquarters that dominate skylines but embody private wealth rather than public trust.
This is why The People’s Trust matters. It reminds us that we once tried to materialize permanence, however imperfectly, in public architecture. It asks whether we still have the capacity to do so or whether our façades today are nothing more than glass towers and logos, stripped of any civic ambition.
Listening to Stone
The People’s Trust is more than a photobook. It is a dialogue between Vahrenwald’s steady images and Scheppe’s probing essay, a meditation on the rhetoric of permanence and the fragility of trust.
The façades in these pages are not ruins, nor are they unbroken monuments. They linger in between: dignified, absurd, stubborn, haunted. They remind us that institutions may falter, but stone endures, whispering of what once was promised.
That is why the book caught my eye so sharply at ICP, and why it has stayed with me since. The cover image condenses the paradox: columns that endure, signage that mocks, permanence shadowed by circulation. It is both comic and tragic, resilient and absurd.
To notice façades again is to see our civic life differently. To listen to them is to hear the fragile, persistent language of trust; always provisional, always in need of renewal.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
Photo: composite of book cover and interior page.
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