Nothing Gold Can Stay

Some of my earliest memories were of long car rides in my Nonna's green Toyota Avalon. We would drive through the small towns peppered along the banks of the Delaware River, and I would listen to her "Old-time stories" about her life, growing up in a small, rural, coal town in Western Pennsylvania. The stories she told me were of a close-knit community, Friday night, football games, and milkshakes at the malt shop. From a very early age, my idea of small-town America was romantic. What my Nonna didn't tell me, at least until I was older, were the reasons why she left that small, coal-mining town. My Nonna's "old-time stories" didn't address the poverty, prejudice, and economic desperation felt by her family and community.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is an ongoing documentary project which explores economic globalization's long-term effects on former industrial cities and small towns across America. Inspired by the stories told to me by my Nonna, photographers from the "New Topographics" movement, and writers from "Lost Generation," I depict the uncertainty, isolation, desperation, beauty, and hope felt across the United States.

My work deals with deciphering nostalgia from reality, myth from fact. America as a construct, a symbol of power, capitalism, freedom, and democratic principles, is deconstructed and examined in our current political and economic reality. The crumbling infrastructure of parking lots, forgotten homes, empty main streets, and abandoned factories are epitaphs for an America long gone, and for some, never existed at all.