I have shot extensively in the Mohave Desert, and also in the area around the Salton Sea, which I call the Lost Riviera.  I was shooting the exteriors of abandoned structures in the desert to document the detritus left behind by man when we had abandoned them, and hadn't restored the area to it's natural state. While shooting these structures I began to be captivated by the interiors of some of them. Most of them were deserted houses, and in some cases it looked as if the people living in these houses had simply gotten up and walked away, leaving everything behind. Not just furniture and clothes, but letters and pictures and mementos, the things that connect you to your life. It almost seemed as if they had left there lives there. And it also often seemed as if there was some trace of them left behind. I found these interiors achingly beautiful, and I felt compelled to try and capture these traces, these echoes of those left behind lives.

I also hope that I can in some small way get us to take our blinders off, and set aside some of our preconceived notions of what is and isn't, or should and shouldn't, be beautiful. We constantly reject things we look at without ever really experiencing them because we have been programmed to. We look at images without ever really seeing them. When we were children we looked at the world with a sense of wonder and discovery. I hope that this project will provoke some of us to challenge our preconceptions, and open our eyes to start seeing again with the eyes of a child, with that sense of wonder.