Working on larger photography projects has brought me the greatest satisfaction as a photographer. They have stimulated my creativity and driven me to explore ideas and experiences I otherwise would never know or understand. Many of the photographers I admire the most, such as Sebastião Salgado and the former Bernd and Hilla Becher, spent years on some of their most lasting work.
When you work on projects, you explore subjects in depth. You learn as you explore, and ideas and perspectives emerge the more you do your work and take pictures that start to form a larger story. Great photographers have all taken on projects. My Manufactured Landscapes series, for example, remains a work in progress.
Perhaps the biggest project I undertook over several years was documenting the legacy of genocide in the 20th century. I visited Europe to examine the Nazi’s legacy of horror, Rwanda (scene of the 1994 genocide against minority Tutsis), and Turkey, where the 20th century’s first documented case of genocide occurred against the Christian Armenian minority of the Ottoman Empire. I have compiled my stories about the lives of cities in a section called the American city, featuring four cities I have called home: Detroit, St. Louis, Portland, and Seattle. My pictures of St. Louis and Detroit focus more on the fall of these two Midwest cities and what that decline means.
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