“Why would you want to take my picture? I’m just going to break your camera… and it looks expensive,” were the first words that I ever heard my grandfather speak. I met him for the first time when I began my project “A Makeshift Home”. This work focuses on the place where I grew up – Swea City, Iowa, a rural farm town that is slowly deteriorating.

Initially I found myself photographing the empty buildings, but I soon became overwhelmed by how forlorn the entirety of town was. A plant sits next to the road, slowly dying, only to be forgotten. Paint chips and windows break in a building next to the post office, never to be seen or thought of and that’s just the way it is.

It’s become imperative to me to document the city as a whole rather than to focus on small parts to depict the changes that happen quickly over time. After photographing the Swea City residents, I have realized that they haven’t noticed how it is falling apart. Sometimes being too close to a thing doesn’t allow you to see it for what it is. It just is. Like the grandfather I grew up not knowing – or peeling paint. These things, like cut grass clippings, are transient. Swea City not only speaks about itself, but every broken down, forgotten city.

My grandfather died two months after I started this project, before I could ever show him his photograph, before I could ever hear him speak again, and before I could get to know whom he even was. A part of myself will continue to go on missing if I don’t keep photographing this town and finding the pieces that aren’t noticed, before they are lost and gone forever.

*Project funded in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant http://www.arts.state.mn.us/