The Second Chances series is on ongoing photographic exploration into the psyche of people who live in remote desert areas. Part anthropology, part documentation and part voyeurism, Second Chances balances the harsh brutality of the landscape with the surreal beauty that defines its isolation while concurrently offering a glimpse into the barrenness of their environment and their lives.
I have been photographing and researching for some years the discarded ruins and abandoned shanties in the Wonder Valley area of the Mojave desert in California. Leftovers from the Small Tract Act of 1938, one of the last of the governments' homestead acts, these dilapidated and empty artifacts of migration, now face the brutal conditions of this harsh land, alone and bravely thwarting off extinction. The transformation from a homestead with a future to the present reality - to homes left to rot and die, be vandalized, squatted-in and then again left, compels me to explore this migration.
(2005 - 2008)