Life is a fragile, beautiful thing, and youth is ever fleeting. I’ve always had a fascination with photography that focuses on a shared reality of the American people. At the root, I consider this to be the human experience in America; the positives and negatives of a person’s life, their fragility and beauty in youth compared to their inevitable decay and death. 

To me, this is best emphasized through the use of the word ‘Americana’, referring to the association of culture and history of America. Growing up in the South, ‘Americana’ to me felt like a small town riddled with decaying buildings and generations of families with nowhere to go, as this is all they’ve ever called home. I wanted to use photography to communicate the relationship between younger generations being surrounded by abandoned architecture to emphasize that what we’ve once known as normal and new will eventually change, age, and decay. My use of black and white photography as a medium brings together this generation’s resurgence of analog techniques as a connection to the past generations that paved the way.