(gentle music) (camera clicking) - What I'm interested in mostly about these places is the once lived-in nature of them and how they have a semblance of familiarity to them.

(camera clicking) but they've been stripped of that by time and decay.

It's like a quick flash, and then it all went away.

(forlorn music) (forlorn music continues) (forlorn music continues) I shoot mostly in the Pacific Northwest, primarily Oregon.

I tend to seek out isolation and a remote nature to places.

High plains and farmland.

(birds chirping) I guess the more remote, the better.

So there's one house that's in Central Oregon on the Columbia Plateau that's completely surrounded by rolling hills and just grassland.

I like that one because it's somewhat ornate.

Someone put effort into that craftsmanship of it in order to make it feel special.

(delicate music) (delicate music continues) I will be successful taking the photograph if the person feels the same uncanny, strange, hard-to-describe feeling that I am feeling when I'm in the moment.

(camera clicking) Most of the houses that I've been to in Oregon that are east of the Cascade Mountain Range, they all have signs that they were abandoned in like the '60s and '70s.

The laminate, the wallpaper.

They were the last remaining people to continue farming, and it just didn't really pan out.

(delicate music continues) You can uncover only so much about someone's life and someone's story, and the rest you kind of have to just make up in your mind.

I think that I've always been interested in them because it's what I grew up in.

I grew up in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

I was raised on a farm that had pigs and cows and chickens.

So this is me in 2004.

I was in fourth grade.

And this is my first pig that I raised at fair.

It was a very isolated logging community.

By the '90s as the lumber industry collapsed, the town itself also faced a lot of economic hardship.

It's a unique experience to live in a place that was kind of in a downturn.

I do enjoy leaving things up for interpretation.

I never tell the full story intentionally because I want the viewer to construct something on their own.

(gentle music) I think that that's something that I've always been intrigued by.

You can tell such a powerful story with so little context.

(gentle music continues) And I hope it inspires curiosity in what else is out there.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) I do wonder how long I'll be able to continue to do this.

There's a finite nature to the subject matter.

Just within the time period that I've been shooting, there have been like hundreds of houses that I've photographed, hundreds of places have been completely bulldozed.

I talked to older people that live out in these areas, and they always say, like, "Oh, back in the '80s and '90s, there were, like, dozens more, and they just were lost to natural disasters."

(lighthearted music) And so the few that are left do feel kind of like these shrines almost.

They feel like representative of like a memory of something that no longer exists.

If I'm the last person to appreciate it, even in the state that it's in, it feels like I'm paying respect to it or respect to the experience.

These places are really special to me, and that'll keep me coming back.

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