You have my admiration for getting this far in the presentation. Of the people who have viewed these pictures I would say that very few went through all 63 images. The majority may have looked at the first 10 or so and moved on. They say that this is one of the convenient aspects of web "browsing." Thank you for having the patience and I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

An obvious fact concerning this project is that the introduction preceding these images is a complete fabrication. I've never been to a Hayden, Virginia (is there such a place?), I don't take business trips and if I did I doubt I'd be wandering around unfamiliar towns taking pictures. These photographs were all shot in Cincinnati. I had been wanting to shoot a section of Reading Road between Reading and Roselawn for a long time. That is where the burned out hotel and convention center mentioned in the introduction is located. Oddly enough, although this part of town looked abandoned, I had no idea that a large section of it was damaged by fire. Stepping into the courtyard and pool area of the Crown Hotel and Convention Center, I was stunned by the devastation. At the same time I was pleased because it gave me a nice resource for the image cycle I was shooting. Although the project had been started prior to this discovery I took about a roll and a half there and it formed the foundation of the series.

I enjoyed taking these pictures for many reasons. It was a pleasure not having to deal with photographing people. I've done a lot of that and I would rather not bother with people shots again. It was also very nice to be in abandoned areas, far from the madding crowd. The beautiful overcast sky in late winter with temperatures in the moderate range fed my imagination and soothed my soul. I could hear the strawberry finches in their nests, singing the song of the coming Spring. Lovely scenarios came into view - encountering some of the bums from Dealey Plaza perhaps or running into Stephen Vincent Strange changing into his sorcerer's costume. My fondest musings were of the old dead and dying America. In my mind I saw men carrying their lunch buckets to work, their wives at home cleaning the house and preparing dinner. I pictured a beaming teenage girl rushing through the front door to tell her grandmother she'd just landed a job at Hardee's or K-Mart. In an earlier time she would have dragged out her close'n'play and listened to the likes of the Supremes, Smokey, or the Captain and Tennille. Wonderful memories, wonderful times.

The huge red brick factory building pictured here once housed the Milacron machine tool company where my father worked for 16 years. In these photographs it resembles a great sarcophagus of the old American Empire. The country known as "America" is gone but the artifacts of the culture remain. Slowly, they too will disappear as the new Visigoths overrun the land. It could, however, be another way. For example, these pictures may be of a town that has been evacuated in anticipation of an enemy attack. Something as mundane as an approaching hurricane never entered my mind. I am thinking more of chemical warfare launched by one of the poor oppressed sons of Islam. At this point even the looters have left town. Most had no cars but they walked on down the road in their running shoes, headphones blaring. I cherished them because they left me alone with my old America. Before the sarin gas arrived I snapped a few photos of the places I loved. The K-marts, the Hardee's, The Crown Hotel - site of the great fire - the Frank's, the dilapidated tire store and machine tool factory. I never felt so at home as I did then. Finally, something else occurred to me. Much like Restif de la Bretonne from a bygone era marked certain sections of his beautiful city with dates and times indicating events that had occurred there, I too was marking my territory. I was saying, in an admittedly maudlin fashion, "I remember when this place was filled with life. I recall the time I was almost caught shoplifting a gold necklace from that store...and, wasn't that the building Debbie tried to burn down when we were driving home from our Senior Prom? Isn't this the drug store where I bought my comic books and pepper spray? I wonder whatever happened to old Mr. Turner, the pharmacist with the handsome wife?"

I must confess that, if it were possible, I would travel these nowhere lands endlessly. Dealing with men and their ever-wandering desires and wardrobes is tiring. I much prefer walking amidst the carrion of forgotten dreams. It is here where the vanity of our pursuits is most apparent - how easily they can all disappear and how suddenly the aftermath of our stupidities can become so gloriously tedious. I sometimes dream of the day when this whole country will be vacant; populated, perhaps, by seekers such as myself looking for the lost Matt Helm novels, the last of the garage mechanics and the Indian-head nickel.


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Photos and text © 2006 Maurice Mattei.