In 1977, at the time I came back to photograph the area where I grew up -- the mills and mill towns north of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River and its tributary, the Beaver -- I didn’t know that way of life would soon go away. My intention was to portray the people who lived here, not by showing the people themselves, but by showing the objects on which they left their imprint. I thought of the images like stage settings after the players had exited, the lives themselves seen in afterimage. In a way it became prophetic, prescient, because in 10 years the mills were shut down and often leveled, the towns were struggling to survive, many of the people had moved away. A way of life gone, like smoke.

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