The ongoing photographic series Succession deals with my interest in the memory retained in a place, the cyclical and the beauty of ruin.

The swirling cloud that is memory, personal, collective as well as the fabricated, drives my creative process I am interested in how photographic images fix memories in the mind, both accurately and inaccurately, and act as a medium in which those memories are allowed to live.

Pierre Nora writes, “The purpose of sites of memory is ‘to stop time, to block the work of forgetting.'” Nora’s description matches perfectly my feelings about how these photographs function, both for myself and for the viewers of my work. My collecting of these images made my contact with that site more permanent to me and they function as miniature memorials, memory catalysts.

I sought out and photographed numerous sites of abandonment including two camps I had attended as a child, twenty acres of derelict greenhouses, the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, roads washed away by floods in New Hampshire, an abandoned squatter’s camp on an abandoned road in Massachusetts and a dilapidated amusement park laden with overgrown signs of its past vitality. Those sites bore the evidence of former lives and, left untended and exposed to the elements, had begun their return to a state more closely resembling their original incarnation, albeit scarred by their human occupation.

My work is meant to stimulate thought about the nature of history and memory and the interplay between the grit of reality and the allure of fiction.