"I've been photographing America's industrial and post-industrial landscape for almost twenty-five years. I take pictures of everyday places where ordinary people struggle to achieve some semblance of the American Dream under less than ideal circumstances. My subjects have included Midwestern factory towns whose industries have closed down, the environmentally ravaged landscape of the Gulf Coast, and, most recently, the new housing developments that are rapidly replacing the rolling farmlands and idyllic small towns that used to define our heartland. Without pressing the point, I hope that my photographs help illuminate the social, cultural, environmental, and economic complexities and contradictions that characterize contemporary American life."
"I was born in New York City but grew up in Europe and North Africa, only returning to America to attend college. I moved to Ohio in 1984 to take a job teaching photography at the University of Akron and am still here, a quarter of a century later. And I have no plans to move elsewhere: my subject is here. Ohio lies at the heart of the Rust Belt, the manufacturing and heavy industry region that dominated America's economy for much of the Twentieth Century but is now characterized by abandoned factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Ohio is a sad and beautiful place whose story is central to understanding America in the present era."