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Before the notion of separating church and state took root in the U.S., "meeting houses" that combined both dotted the New England landscape. Built by townships, often paid for by taxes, and home to Sunday morning sermons as well as weekday commerce, these handsome structures played a central role in states like Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Photographer Paul Wainwright has devoted himself to capturing large-format portraits of these buildings today. In many of the pictures, he shoots the meeting houses in black and white, capturing their strikingly modern look against the sky and clouds. In others, he uses color to highlight their gleaming white clapboard walls. In all of them, he conveys the classically American look of the design. As Paul says, "There is something moving about a structure that has long outlived the community to which it was familiar, surviving lonesomely in a new age, the life of which it has no part." May these photos help the meeting houses to find new community and worldwide respect.

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