New Promise Land Inc.

Over the course of five years, often while living in my car and tracing the historic 395 route through California to Oregon, I explored the question of how to photograph loss. Loss of home, loss of identity, loss of community. Navigating an America deeply connected to the land — on one side the theatrics of the Sierras, on the other the callous beauty of the high desert — are the vestiges of communities defined by resilience and faith. Some can trace their ancestry to the first settlers in the West.

Forgotten in abandoned homes and junk yards are intimate family portraits from the 50s to the present, memories tracing back to the genesis of these towns. Drawn to opportunities in mineral mines and logging, families migrated to the decadent desserts and forests of the West Coast. Company apparatuses, having promised a prosperous place in middle-class America, raped the Earth of its resources for decades and closed.

What remains are communities that feel left behind, marginalized—the gatekeepers of an America founded on hard work, toil, and religious principle.

New Promise Land Incorporated was in Mojave, California. It was a modest three-room building on a highway across from a Denny's. It was brimming with litter, broken glass, torn cables, and debris. Blankets were thrown across the floors of what had become a makeshift refuge—with no door in place, no unshattered window, and ceiling tiles on the floor. There was little in its simple architecture to suggest what plans its owner once had for it. The promises its creator once hoped to inspire, the congregation it was meant to shelter. It has recently been demolished entirely.

What are the promises made that define the American Dream? How do we hold those words accountable? At a time when our national identity is in question, what are the realities that inspire deep nostalgia for the past? In New Promise Land Inc we witness the margins of past and present bleed together, moments of time indistinguishable in a landscape of decades, human presence and the Earth's gifts fading, slowly, and all at once, in isolation, together.