It was a sticky summer evening and small dense clouds of sulfur hung in the air. The pops and cracks of bang snaps and bottle rockets ricocheted down the streets and alleyways. Lightning bugs flickered, and twilight drew a pastel sheet over the horizon.  The scene elicits bittersweet feelings from simpler times.

As long as I have been photographing, I’ve been drawn to an austere beauty and sensibility of "home"--specifically, the imagery of midwest blue-collar America. The scenes are typically of a paradoxical nature; pictures of contemporary life that seem trapped in a dreamlike memory. It is a decaying vision of the past and an uncertain view of the future. My ongoing series, Phantom Homeland, attempts to make sense of these ideas by exploring the process of constructing nostalgia: That complicated mix of an emotion that exists in the spaces between joy, regret, memory and fantasy.