I shot this portrait at the PSA yearly photo festival last September. I had signed up for a model shot, where the man in my image symbolized Earth with his face covered in cracked and dry greenish colored mud. I chose to convert his portrait into Black and White to dramatize textures and to create more depth. I asked him to close his eyes and in a meditative pose touch his dry soil cracked face with his soft hands. The idea was to capture a duality in the relationship between us human beings and Mother Earth – we are both caretakers and sources of harm. On the one hand, we pollute and destroy the earth we live in. But on the other hand, we also take care of it, make it flourish, and provide healing. For us, and for Mother Earth’s survival, we humans have a shared responsibility to take better care and heal the wounds of Mother Earth.

A gray wintry morning, best spent indoors. I set up my camera looking through a window to capture the frost. Very little editing was done – just cropping, curves, and some sharpening.

This is a photo of the “Abandoned Presidents Heads” which are now on a farm near Williamsburg, Virginia.

Going Anywhere soon? was taken in Bodie, a historical State Park in California. The mining town has been left to decay. This truck was one of those objects and is not far from an old Shell gas station with the old style pumps and a metal shell-shaped sign with multiple bullet holes. What is nice is that the truck stands out, but the old buildings in the background provide context.

I got this at one of the “mud sales” near Lancaster PA a few years ago: Huge auctions to raise money for the local firefighters, attended by Amish and “English” [that’s us] equally. The Amish thing is so fascinating, and their children, dressed not like kids but as miniature adults, are even more so. Their interactions, like their lives, seem rooted in a different era.

I took this picture two summers ago on a tour of the abandoned Cresson sanatorium in Lilly, PA which was converted to a prison in 1987. I think it is kind of timely. Later on, the prison closed in 2013 so abruptly that the personnel found it out only from inmates who were watching TV in their cells at the time. No wonder, there were abandoned filing cabinets. And fast forward a few decades, who knows if there are more abandoned filing cabinets in somewhere, again. Sony a6300; GM 24 mm F1.4 Lens; 1/160 sec; 24 mm; f 5.6; ISO 400.