The rattle of the cars, the distant sound of the horn as we move through town after town.  Fourteen hours there and thirteen hours back I was stuck on one track.

I had not had enough time to process the death of my friend and former professor, Toby Morriss before I was thrust back out into the world.   I had a place of comfort in Columbia, surrounded by people who felt the same mixture of sadness and anger that I felt.  It was jarring to find myself out of this comfort zone.  I found myself on a train up to Philadelphia that became a kind of time warp.  Just as time seemed to completely stop it would also seem to speed up. I would get lost in a train of thought and suddenly realize that hours had gone by, while other times I felt as though I could physically feel every second as it passed. 

With nothing to do and a mind-numbing amount of time to sit and think, I began taking photographs. I thought about Toby and the images that he took on his travels, but I also thought about what the idea of a trip meant.  I was stuck to this path that had been carved out for the sole purpose of moving this train back and forth across the country.  It provided me with a constantly shifting landscape that I attempted to capture. What I was left with was a fragmented impression of what I saw that I pieced back together out of order, creating a fictitious landscape.  Though we may fight against it, memory, over time, fades. Things become jumbled and out of order and someday my memories of Toby will similarly be out of order and confused in the same way that these landscapes are.


This series is not about where I’m going or where I’m coming from.  It’s about the constant flux of life, memory, and time.