Detroit Series Statement

My most recent work is a series of photomontages of Detroit. Images that I hope capture the reality of daily life and reflect a distinctly American landscape where industry, urban and nature collides. The images are a documentation of the quiet beauty and decay of the city.  How we as a society have affected and continue to alter the environment that surrounds us. Portraits of abandoned and neglected spaces left to the elements. Places that exist in silence, scenes of vanishing industry, urban ruins, storefronts and the urban prairie.
 
I am currently involved with this ongoing project of documenting the city of Detroit
in a series of photomontage work. When I first started photographing Detroit, I did so as a way to document what had taken place over the years, and how the city was left in such a state. The more I went out into these neighborhoods, the more I became interested in bringing attention to this severe problem of blight. I had started to get to know people that were living surrounded by abandoned homes, the real playgrounds for the children of Detroit. Not the small downtown area that is going through a rebirth so to speak.

This had an emotional impact on me. I started to see other work people were doing to show urban decay, I wanted to present this genre in a different style. I exaggerate the color so at first glance you don't notice the house in its state, then you zero in and see the decay. That's what I want I want people to see it.
 
I work in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator creating layers with photographs I have taken throughout the city and backgrounds I have created.  Although my work is representational I am also interested in the story of these scenes. How is it these places were left in this condition, the people that lived there and sometimes the people still living in these abandoned home’s. 

My heart, my art, to those who live it everyday. I am only a witness, I live in Detroit, but in a little utopia, an area sixty years ago was called the Black Bottom, the slums.