What I'm working on... formally.

Toledo, Ohio is located on the western end of Lake Erie, on the Michigan-Ohio border, about an hour south of Detroit.  Its history is rooted in manufacturing, starting with innovations in the plate glass industry and developing later as a hub of suppliers to the automakers in Detroit.  As the manufacturing industry has declined, so has Toledo.

 I have been traveling to Ohio on a regular basis to make photographs.  I am interested in the trickle down effect the decline in manufacturing has on the larger local economy.  This is visually evident in the husks of strip-malls and abandoned commercial and industrial spaces that litter the landscape.

I hope to expand the project to include the grassroots movements that have cropped up locally to shape the future of Toledo into one that considers sustainability and local production/consumption.

 With abandoned relics of better times littering the landscape, Toledo can serve as a microcosm of America's contemporary challenges.  All around are indicators of the downturn in the global economy, the loss of "Yankee ingenuity," and the pitfalls of a shift towards developing for profit versus developing for need.