Busacca Gallery

Abandoned Restrooms - Erick, Oklahoma 2013 This image is from “The Borrowed Horizon,” an unfinished project examining the contemporary American landscape over a series of recent travels. Intuition, light, and serendipity provide the subject matter as I travel along the two lane highways and back roads that cut so close to the bone of America. Informed and inspired by the work of Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander, I set out into a photographic tradition filled with great artists and iconic images. My intent is not to rehash or imitate that which came before but to simply do the work that makes me happy and record the America that I see, in my time. Erick is a very small town in western Oklahoma with a general store and an abandoned hardware store that sits untouched since the doors were mysteriously locked in 1967. You can still look into the oversized, dusty plate glass windows and see tools in the display cabinets. Walking the few, wide, western streets that make up Erick, you cannot help but feel as though the passage of time somehow has less influence there. I made this image on a cool February afternoon during a trip along Route 66. The abandoned restrooms were attached to a shuttered business, a restaurant or bar perhaps. The light, texture, and geometry immediately jumped out at me, and I like that something as mundane as an old restroom can assume it’s own beauty under the right conditions.