“It is the desperate moment that we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Like citizens in a besieged city on its final days, we know our world is burning, we know it is damaged beyond repair, we know that the end is coming, but we’re unable to stop it. Only those in power have the ability to stop the inevitable, but they are unwilling to help. Instead, our worst attributes have won and in our insatiable thirst for more, we’ve commodified every natural resource, sacrificed our own planet, and future generations will have to pay for it. 

Inanimate Altruism is an ongoing series of gelatin silver prints documenting the visible symptoms of our failed human empire and our cultural attitudes toward nature. I see the evidence of humanity’s eternal struggle with nature everywhere I go. In our cities, our suburbs, our industrial areas, and in between every single human-made structure, the natural world can be found living in the cracks, surviving, adapting, and thriving despite our efforts. I can see it just behind our carefully manicured gardens, just over the barrier from our highways, and in the way we restrain, block, and remove living things from our cities to make room for steel and concrete monuments to our self-destruction.

All photographs are available as Gelatin Silver prints, upon request.