The Towns Between

Twenty-one years ago, I moved to a small town looking for a different kind of life.

I wanted to escape the crowded suburbs of Chicago and find somewhere quieter. Somewhere I could raise a family. A place where my kids could run around and play at night, where life moved a little slower and the world somehow felt a little smaller.

At the time, I thought I had found exactly that.

More than two decades later, I'm not sure I see small-town life quite the same way I did when I first arrived. My kids grew up. I got older. The town changed. I changed.

But there's still something about these places that pulls me in.

It's the historic downtowns and century-old buildings with dates pressed into decorative stone. The independent shops and mom-and-pop restaurants. The parades, summer markets and movies in the park.

It's sitting on a front porch during football season and hearing the announcer from the high school stadium somewhere in the distance, followed seconds later by the roar of the crowd when the home team scores.

It's driving through miles of cornfields just to get somewhere that resembles the world outside of town.

And it's the grain elevators rising above everything else—our country skyscrapers.

There is a nostalgia to small-town America that's difficult for me to separate from the reality of living in it. These places are changing. Some traditions survive. Others disappear. Buildings find new purposes or sit empty. Businesses come and go. Generations grow up and leave while others decide to stay.

I don't photograph small towns because I believe they were better in the past, and I'm not trying to preserve some perfect version of what they once were.

I'm interested in what they are now.

Sometimes I'll drive into a town I've never visited, park the car and simply start walking. I don't necessarily know what I'm looking for. An old storefront, a grain elevator, a faded sign, a railroad crossing, a neighborhood, or something completely ordinary might make me stop.

The photographs on this page aren't really about one particular town.

They're about exploring these places, paying attention to the small details, and trying to understand what it is about small-town America that still feels familiar—even when I've never been there before.

And sometimes, if I keep looking long enough, one of those places reveals a story of its own.