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SCHOHARIE COUNTY — Steve Gross and Susan Daley had already been making photographs in Schoharie County for 10 years when they brought their work to editor Jim Mairs at W.W. Norton in 1997 — and it would be another 10 years before Mairs declared the project ready for publication. But the true birth of “Time Wearing Out Memory: Schoharie County” (2008) came much earlier, in 1974, when Gross and Daley met while studying in the vaunted photography program at the University of New Mexico.

They have collaborated ever since, sharing lives and work, earning a living with a commercial studio in New York City and, as of 1987, keeping a second home in the Schoharie town of North Blenheim. Along the way, they’ve published seven best-selling books on historic houses. But none of those was like “Time Wearing Out Memory,” which Gross described as “like our first book all over again . . . our first art book.”

Suggesting stories

Consisting of 104 black-and-white images — reproduced in duotone on matte paper — the personal, understated nature of the book is apparent from the first page spreads: an overview of a farmed landscape under gray clouds; two studies of the Dutch Reformed Church in Breakabeen as it quietly falls apart; a sharply rendered detail of an abandoned house in Broome, paired with a more distant view of the same house dominated by a huge oak.

The captions simply identify the buildings and their locations, but the pictures suggest stories. It’s clear that hundreds of years of history are written on this land and these walls.

In the book’s introduction, novelist Jeffrey Lent writes: “There are stories here, stories down every hallway, in every bedroom, in the old kitchen, stories both universal and particular and peculiar to individuals, testimonials to personality. Many can never be known, never be read or understood beyond the mild comprehension of lives passed, of lives past.”

One reason Gross and Daley take the pictures is because they wonder what those tales might be. Another motivation is to capture what’s there before it goes away.

“A lot of times, it would just be in the late summer evenings after we’ve had dinner; we would go for a drive and do maybe one or two shots, and it was just to record what we saw around us,” Gross said. “We weren’t planning that it would be a book or even an art project; it was just, ‘Boy, that barn looks like it’s going to fall down. Let’s take a picture of it.’ ”

Working slowly, with a 19th-century view camera, the photographers share in the decision-making process, the looking and the choice of final image.

“If the camera is on a tripod, there’s a lot of thought and planning that goes into a shot,” Gross said, adding that “60 or 70 or 80 percent of the whole process could be thinking about it.”

Clearly, these are not your decisive-moment type of pictures; rather, they hark back to the time of the great American photographers of the Depression, such as Walker Evans, or even earlier, to turn-of-the-century pictures by the French photographer Eugène Atget. As documents of history that show as much atmosphere as they do physical detail, photographs like these are often characterized as communicating a sense of place.

An eye on the sky

Significantly, there are no people in the pictures. They are more intent on architectural presences, qualities of light and the passage of time. And in Gross and Daley’s Schoharie photographs, that means keeping an eye on the sky.

“Rural life is so much about the weather,” Gross said. “You’re constantly looking at the sky. . . . We’re very aware of that in [that] the weather becomes another element of the pictures, another dimension that we’re trying to capture.”

This quality of atmosphere also comes across in the way that the pictures are printed. Though the 4-by-5-inch format of the negatives allows for extremely sharp contrast and detail, the book’s pages are filled with soft, middle-grays as well, and the traces of the darkroom are evident in the burned-in clouds that bear down on many of the book’s old barns and houses. Still, the work is not a sentimental trip down memory lane.

“It’s not really about nostalgia or romance of the past at all,” Gross said.

“It’s about what we see now.”

That evidence of the present Schoharie County includes a number of views of vibrant country stores and working farms. But the bulk of the pictures do evoke the past, and they show just how much of the past remains quite present in the county.

Dawn Johnson, a committee chairwoman of the Schoharie County Historical Society and local activist who grew up just over the Albany County line in Berne, has lived in the village of Schoharie since 2000. She stumbled upon “Time Wearing Out Memory” on display at an Albany bookstore and was immediately enthralled with it.

“I was really drawn to [the book] because, even as a child, for some reason I always loved old barns,” she said. “They’re awe-inspiring even though they’re in black-and-white; they’re not painted, but they’re still here, they’re still here, they’ve endured — weather and neglect and they’re hanging in there.”

“I don’t think [the book] necessarily represents Schoharie County, because Schoharie County is really very vital and alive,” Johnson added. “But I think it represents actually the heritage of the county.”

She continued: “The photographs . . . help you to tie the past with the present, so that no matter what happens in the future, this is still a part of the heritage here, [whether] the farming community . . . or the country store in Gallupville. I mean, I still shop there, and that was there when I was a kid, and I’m 64 years old.”

Magic moments

The 20 years that Gross and Daley have spent documenting their surroundings in Schoharie, and the pictures they produced, are now part of that heritage. The book, with its fine reproduction and careful sequencing has seen to that. From just living there, they evolved through the process of photography into a new, deeper relationship with their rural home.

“A lot of the shots were places that we’ve literally driven by for years until we were out with our camera, with our film, ready,” Gross said. “When you come around the corner and the cloud is there or the light or the time of season with the trees, it’s just that magic moment — Schoharie-ology we call it.”

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