Portraits of Place

I consider my work to be portraits of unique places, an exploration of the character, history, architectonics, and memory of a location. Architecture, archaeology, and a love of travel have always been strong interests; I traveled to North Africa and Europe between high school and college, so I had an opportunity to explore the architecture and ruins found there. The catacombs, churches, monestaries, and pyramids were fascinating, and I wanted to know more about where they had come from, more of their history. This interest in ruins and living history eventually became the modern ruins photographic project, looking back I can see that it was closely linked to my interest in places where history could still be experienced and explored, and my architectural and environmental design studies in college. I couldn't always be traveling, so I began exploring closer to home, which turned out to be a very rich place to look.

This series of photographic essays is an ongoing project I have been working on since my architectural studies in the mid 1980’s.  My initial interest in ruins and industrial sites started when I was working at a shipyard on the Mississippi river in New Orleans, I worked on a 18,000 ton dry-dock where we would float oil tankers and cargo ships up out of the brown muddy waters. When out of the water those ships looked like stranded whales caught on the beach at low tide. I would take photographs at sunset when the warm hazy light was revealing the textures of barnacles, rust and peeling paint on the ships massive underbelly. 

I'm also interested in human culture, what we do, where we have been, what we have left behind. I am interested in the signs and symbols of habitation and occupation. These structures can be windows into our unique past, they tell tales through the architecture, objects, and small details left behind. Memories are inscribed in unexpected places, on the walls and in the discarded objects; the silent rooms and dust covered furniture recall lost moments and previous experiences. Ruins are the containers of events, still vibrant and surprisingly alive with the memories of the past. These places are true living museums, preserving the past in a raw unpolished form.

There is a layered history in ruins, ordered and random pieces of a large puzzle are clumped together, confused by years of decay, at times revealing unexpected artifacts that can seem familiar, or distant and foreign. At times they read like archives, housing memories of a changed culture, long forgotten pieces of the past preserved as if in a time capsule. These sites exist in the fringe landscapes of our cities, places that were once hardwired to the center of the social and industrial infrastructure, places once the cutting edge of technology and manufacturing, now they are faded shadows hidden behind cyclone fences on the urban outskirts, along old canals and abandon rail lines. They map an old system of industrial landscapes now encroached upon by office parks, shopping malls, and expanding sprawl. Nature is reclaiming these landscapes, the cracked peeling warped shapes are yielding to the sun, wind, water and sea, ironically these old industrial sites have become havens for wildlife in the fast encroaching suburban landscape.

When first visiting ruins I realized that these abandon buildings had an interest and meaning that went beyond the original design intent, that in fact they had become something quite different; the original function had become lost with time and disuse and there had been a transformation over time from a utilitarian structure to one that was void of function. The architectural meanings and interpretations had become skewed or lost, a language that was new and cryptic had emerged. These rooms, buildings and landscapes housed memories of the past in empty silent spaces and relinquished the present to entropy and decay. These places no longer provided shelter. Time was not measured by the rhythms of occupants any longer, but by the peeling of paint, rusting of metal and the dripping of water. The slow deterioration and decay made it less like architecture and more a space evoking images of its past, a memory of architecture and inhabitant with a language coming from subtle clues, scrawls on the wall, well worn surfaces; suggestions of past residents mingling with its highly emotive state of decay.

Since school I have done a lot of traveling to visit some of the great ruins of the world including the Great pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon in Athens, the Mayan ruins of Central America, the great ruined city of Pagan in Burma and others. My main focus however has been to spend time exploring local ruins found in the abandon fringe areas of cities and towns. In many respects the local ruins are more interesting to me, I can understand the history of these places and can read more of the story in these old sites than I can in a thousand year old stone structure whose culture I know much less about. These local ruins tell a history that is quite unique to each one, the fact that most of the ruins I photograph are relatively recent allow them to tell a story that is more poignant, there are more artifacts surviving to give evidence of its past. Part of my goal is to uncover the stories the old hulks tell, and discover what histories are written in the flotsam that is left after the structure is abandon. The architecture remembers much about its own history, there are many stories written in the old boards and bricks and stones and details that can be coaxed out with the camera.

Some of our cultural prejudices effect the way we see some of these ruins, the Insane Asylum project is a good example. The architecture is heavily loaded with what the viewer imagines the history of this place might have been. The architecture becomes charged with our own perceptions of what a asylum is and what we have been taught or heard about asylums through books, movies and stories. We imagine what it was like to be there when patients were there and what kinds of suffering or healing may have occurred in those halls, rooms and cells. The psychological impact of architectural spaces is an area that interests me, with my photographs I explore the levels of meaning that are attached to a shared cultural memory, architecture and intimate-public space.

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