After I took the negatives, I put them away because I was unhappy with the prints I made from them -- too glossy, too Black & White. When I thought of Western Pennsylvania and the mill towns, I thought of gray, the heavily overcast days of autumn and winter, when the sky fits over the valleys’ hills like a lid, and all the colors are shades of gray: red-gray, blue-gray, green-gray. On gray days, the objects of the world stand in their own light, wrapped in their own shadows; things appear to glow with the intensity of their individual being. On gray days, the world has a luster, like steel. Rediscovering the negatives 25 years later was like finding the contents of a time capsule, artifacts from a defunct civilization. Which, in many ways, they are.

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