I feel called to photograph things that have survived, and transcended, time: an instrument that has fallen silent, a truck no longer able to carry cargo, a building inexorably losing its ability to defy gravity. These things bear somber, dignified witness to the more elemental materials with which we once built our environment: wood, steel, brick; and to the craftsmanship with which they were used.
What happens when we neglect our creations fascinates me. The second they are discarded, nature begins reclaiming them back into the elements from which they came. Decay and deterioration are terms often used to describe this phenomenon. But I like the word "entropy," the idea that absent the application of outside energy, nature tends to move from a state of order to one of disorder. Plants and animals begin using unwanted things for support and shelter. Brick walls crumble into piles and eventually revert to the clay from which they were made. Metals rust, becoming thinner over the years until they disappear. Wooden structures fall to the ground and feed the soil on which they rested for so long.
Whether from this natural, entropic process, through recycling, by being "rehabilitated" (and not always for the better) or as the targets of urban renewal, these vestiges are disappearing. My mission is to photograph them before they are gone. But I think they deserve more than a simple documentary record. I try to photograph and print them to encourage you, the viewer, to contemplate the stories that they accumulated over the years, what they might have meant to the people who used them, and what we have really lost when they are finally gone. To this end, I work to eliminate details that obscure the essence of what compelled me to photograph a particular thing. I shoot medium and large format film, and use my camera and darkroom skills to produce the sharpest, highest-quality negatives that I can. I have chosen the lith printing process to emphasize the venerable qualities of the things that I photograph.
While I also photograph other subjects such as interesting places to which I travel, elements of the natural landscape, and the evanescent qualities of the atmosphere, entropy is the heart of my work. It was one of the first things toward which my camera was drawn. It is a subject that I have returned to time and again, and it is the one that satisfies me most fully.