Community Lost

Community Lost explores spaces, that once brought people together to connect, but are now closed to the public. Despite closure, they once celebrated community and connections within the spaces and the invitation that no longer exists.

Community Lost examines the changing landscape of American community through photographs of places once designed for gathering, connection, and collective life. Churches, , community centers, and schools,—ordinary spaces embedded in the fabric of everyday life—are increasingly left vacant, shuttered, or in disrepair.

Using infrared photography, I transform these familiar environments into something simultaneously recognizable and estranged. The altered tonalities of infrared create an otherworldly quality, distancing the viewer from the documentary surface of the places while emphasizing their absence of human presence. What might otherwise be overlooked becomes a meditation on loss, displacement, and the erosion of communal space.

A church without a parish becomes a mausoleum of the history that worshiped and celebrated within its wall. A closed community center becomes a monument to a social function that has been interrupted. These spaces retain traces of their intended purpose even after the people for whom they were created have disappeared.

The photographs are not simply records of decline; they are invitations to consider what is lost when the physical spaces that facilitate human connection disappear, and what might be possible if those spaces were once again understood as essential to a functioning community.