I have been photographing along the back roads and in small towns of the Midwest for the past several years, in a broad geographic area from as far west as Utah, through the great plains of South Dakota, and along the river ways of the Ohio, the Wabash, and the Mississippi. Week long and weekend road trips have allowed me to photograph the people, the landscapes and the architecture of the rural small towns that make up the backbone of our Midwestern culture. From this casual exploring and photographing I’ve come to recognize a greater urgency in documentation of the quickly changing landscape of small towns, and especially their vernacular architecture, as well as better appreciate and understand the quiet importance and value of these buildings. They are significant because they are a part of our history, a part of what makes us who we are. Small towns and their buildings are a complicated amalgam of their social, economic and natural environments. They merit research to help provide an understanding of what it means to live in a particular region at a particular time, and how as they diminish and depopulate, they will affect the national fabric.

There is an inherent beauty in the vernacular building, a grace of form, craftsmanship and function that is rarely duplicated today. They carry with them a sense of dignity, of permanence; they resonate with the character of the people that built and worked in them. And yet often because of changing economic realities, vernacular buildings and the knowledge they contain are being abandoned and destroyed, replaced by the cheap, fashionable and expedient. 2001- ongoing.