Behold this Time builds through ongoing encounters within and around the municipalities, the company towns, the landscapes, and the social spaces of the American Bottom region in Illinois. This is a particularly inscrutable place where every turn resists visibility. The American Bottom is also a place where ongoing life and the traces of social and cultural loss coexist. 

I concentrate on the region’s many company towns and the various traces of human engagement, where ongoing habitation and industrial production commingle with social and cultural erasures. And yet, there are also moments of enduring fortitude. The histories of place and a sense of belonging can be felt in this landscape.

The familiar narratives of population decline and social unraveling in towns throughout the U.S. often obscure the nuanced realities of peoples’ lived experience. I don’t intend these photographs to exist as neutral detached records, and I don’t simply aim to document this place. Instead, I work to construct a living archive—to bring the contemporary landscape and the histories of the region together.

There is power in the photograph to acknowledge and affirm lived experience and to provide opportunities to build community through image sharing. This work becomes an active, visible, public set of encounters that build sustained commitments to people and cultural places across the region.