The local is a walk through my hometown, a struggling mill town in New England. Positioned between T.S. Eliot’s The Waste landand William Carlos Williams Patterson, the work is critical of the deterioration and disregard of rural America, but still very much in love with the idiosyncrasiesand hidden back alleys of places both familiar and strange.
Two major roads pass through here, carrying people to and from the larger northeastern cities perhaps keeping this place from sinking into record as another industrial town, devoured by a culture that no longer needs it.
In my life I have seen houses and shops erected, razed, burnt and rebuilt; but for all that trouble the feeling of stasis still looms. The landscape is shifting, not changing just shifting, stuck in its own history but touched by the world passing through.
The resulting pictures are as much a love letter to a known but unrecognizable place as they are an account of disintegrating histories and small town troubles.