Working Structures
Across the rural American West, certain buildings announce themselves from miles away. Grain elevators rise above the grasslands and dominate the skyline of every agricultural town along the rail corridors that determined where those towns grew and where they didn't. They were the economic hub of a region — the physical expression of how wheat moved from field to market, how a dispersed agricultural civilization organized itself across distances. They were landmarks before there were roads worth the name, and they shaped patterns of settlement and migration that are still legible in the landscape today. This work spans Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, with forays into Wyoming — a geography defined less by state lines than by those same rail corridors and the grain economies they served.
Driving these roads, I pass other kinds of structures, too — empty houses in locations that no longer offer proximity to work or community, stores that didn't survive whatever changed around them, barns that serve no livestock. In those buildings I recognize the concept of melancholy: not my own emotion exactly, but the shape of a loss I can't access and didn't experience. I'm reading something off a surface, the way you might read grief in a stranger's posture — aware of its form without knowing its content. The grain elevators refuse that reading. They are not abandoned. Nothing has concluded. And that difference — between a structure that stopped and one that hasn't — turns out to be the real subject of this work.
These buildings were difficult and expensive to construct, and they remain so to maintain. The weather that makes the harvest possible can just as easily withhold it, and that uncertainty is structural — built into the enterprise from the beginning. Yet, these towers persist. Every patch, every repair made with whatever material was at hand, every addition pressed against an earlier wall, or taken down at the end of its service, represents a decision to continue rather than conclude. Nothing has been preserved. Everything has been used. Their surfaces carry the accumulated evidence of that persistence — weathering, mishap, the layering of one material over another, anonymous graffiti, commissioned murals. What I find in those surfaces isn't the opposite of melancholy. It's something quieter and more complicated — closer to austere respect, the feeling you might have watching someone continue difficult work without complaint or recognition, for longer than you can easily imagine.
A farmer once rolled up in his pickup while I was photographing and asked if I had worked there some time in the past. He couldn't quite locate any other reason a person would stop and look carefully at something so familiar to him. That gap — between his daily relationship to these structures and my sustained attention to them — is another part of what this work is about. Living with something can obscure what it means. Distance, and a camera, can sometimes recover it. Though, I hold that thought carefully: the question of who gets to assign meaning to a working landscape — the people whose labor built and sustained it, or the outsider with a camera — is not one I can answer with confidence. Am I finding something real in these surfaces, or inventing something to satisfy my own desires? I've decided that uncertainty is worth keeping. The buildings don't need to mean what I find in them for the photographs to be true.
For most of my career I photographed buildings that were designed to be looked at — commercial and architectural work where beauty was specified, budgeted, and expected. These structures are the opposite of that. They were built out of necessity and purpose, and somewhere in that process they acquired a beauty that no architect dictated and no client requested. That tension — between functional necessity and unrepeatable beauty — was something I hadn't encountered in that earlier work, and it's what drew me here.
What keeps me returning is the present tense: what light does to a corrugated wall at a particular hour, how shadow bisects a facade and turns it into something a painter might have planned. The weathering is not picturesque. The deterioration is not mourned. What I'm after is an accurate reading of what these surfaces actually argue — understanding that ideas and sentiment accumulate on corrugated metal and eroding concrete just as surely as rust and weather do. These buildings earned their monumentality without asking for it.
