The Luxury of Decay

I was raised in the hoard. Growing up in a map-dot town in rural Louisiana, my horizon wasn't defined by grand landscapes, but by forgotten things. My grandfather’s land was a graveyard of objects—a chaotic archive that trained my eye to find the signal in the noise.

It taught me a brutal truth that now defines this work: In these communities, decay is a luxury.

To let something sit and rot is an extravagance that the working class cannot afford. You use a machine until it breaks. Then you use the parts until they turn to dust. What is left behind is not trash; it is evidence.

This series is an autopsy of that survival. It is a meditation on the tension between faith and death—the two absolutes of the American South.

I do not shoot these structures to mock their collapse. I shoot them as portraits of the absent. These are not piles of refuse; they are secular altars. I treat them with the reverence of a crime scene or a shrine, looking for the fingerprints of the hands that last touched them.

This is the beauty of the overlooked.
The resilient dignity of the end.