About My Photography
For a long time, I thought photography was about going somewhere worth photographing.
A beautiful landscape. An interesting city. An extraordinary place.
The longer I've been a photographer, the less certain I am that's true.
Some of the photographs that mean the most to me have been made close to home, in places I've driven past hundreds of times without really seeing.
A small town most people pass through on their way somewhere else. A grain elevator rising above the horizon. An empty shopping mall that once held thousands of people's memories. The remains of a state hospital hidden in a part of town I lived near for years without knowing it existed.
I've become increasingly interested in ordinary places and the stories they carry.
The Midwest is full of them.
There are towns shaped by railroads and agriculture, buildings that have outlived the reasons they were built, landscapes divided and reshaped by generations of people, and places that once mattered deeply to a community but are slowly disappearing from its memory.
Sometimes I'm interested in the history.
Sometimes it's the way a place is changing.
And sometimes it's simply the way the light falls across something I've never bothered to notice before.
Photography has become my reason to stop.
To get out of the car. To walk a road I've driven a hundred times. To turn down a street I've never taken. To wonder why a building is there, what happened inside it, or what existed there before.
I don't always know what I'm looking for when I leave with a camera.
I'm beginning to think that's important.
Because the camera gives me permission to be curious—to explore places without needing to know beforehand what I'll find.
Some discoveries become a single photograph. Others lead me back again and again until they begin to become something larger.
A body of work.
A story.
A record of a place at a particular moment in its life.
My photography isn't really about abandoned buildings, small towns, farms, malls, or any particular subject.
It's about paying attention.
About recognizing that places don't have to be extraordinary to matter.
Sometimes we just need to look again.