American Value is an ongoing photographic project shaped by a belief in the enduring significance of place. Although I did not begin the work with a fixed thesis, I have come to understand it through the lens of my upbringing in Detroit between 1983 and 2007, a period of prolonged industrial decline, population loss, and economic hardship. Raised in a city widely framed through crisis, I learned to read landscapes differently: to recognize both loss and persistence, to see ambition in every place, and to understand that what remains still carries meaning.
Beginning in 2017, the project expanded to communities across the United States. Traveling for my work in public policy, where regions are often reduced to economic indicators or political shorthand, I encountered visual echoes of a shared vernacular of labor, aspiration, and adaptation. These places reveal not only contemporary life but also histories embedded in architecture and the built environment. Like Detroit, they resist simplification.
Made with a medium-format camera on color 120 film, the photographs trace evidence of human presence across time. Some are intentionally overexposed, allowing overlooked places to assert their own visual and cultural significance. The work approaches these environments with affection rather than irony, reflecting the way I first learned to see in Detroit. It resists both nostalgia and condescension, considering how abandonment, persistence, renewal, and memory accumulate in place—and how those layers continue to shape the contemporary American landscape and our understanding of ourselves.
