Industrial Modernism & Engineered Form

The objects I photograph were built to do a job: carry loads, transfer force, hold pressure, move. Every part of their shape is there because an engineer decided it was needed.

I grew up in Highland Park, Michigan. My family worked for Ford, and after high school so did I, at the River Rouge plant. Then the Marine Corps, in aviation; then aircraft manufacturing at Lockheed; later, human factors engineering at NASA and in Navy shipbuilding. I’ve been taking photographs since the 1970s.

My influences are Charles Sheeler, who photographed the Rouge for Ford in 1927; Bernd and Hilla Becher, who spent more than forty years photographing industrial structures one type at a time, the same way every time; and Christopher Payne, who photographs American factories today.

I work from ground level, on a tripod, in available light. Nothing is staged.