In essence photographs serves a similar function to an abandoned space - they are a sort of dead moment, frozen in time. The conditions that created them no longer exist, but we can glimpse another moment in time through them. Nonetheless, that reality that they represent is lost forever. You can't flip a photograph over and see another perspective of the image, and soon the detail is lost to grain. Likewise, you can sift through and examine an abandoned site until the end of time and you will never be able to find your way to the point when it was alive. The are both proof that something existed, but exists no longer. In this sense they are both the purest embodiment of loss; the tragedy they represent is unchangeable and eternal. It is not just our own mortality we see in them, or the mortality of a place or way of life. In them we see the mortality of the moment itself, and the fact that the process of being is like standing on the edge of a cliff, where the potential of the future meets the actuality of the present, and streams endlessly into the oblivion of an unknowable past. They are incontrovertible evidence that nothing ever lasts.

Photograph taken at Bethlehem Steel administrative offices, Lackawanna NY.