Photographing ruins merges my passions for history and photography. I'm drawn to these sites to make a spiritual connection with those who came before us, preserve the visual poetry of what they left behind, and restore what they've built to our collective memory. In this act of creation, I confront my own mortality and become most alive.

I have three criteria for selecting these sites: They have to be preserved as historic ruins; they must make a distinctive architectural and geographic contribution to the series; and they should be suitable subjects for infrared photography, a medium that best evokes their inherent mystery.

Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but I use a specially adapted 35 mm digital camera to record it. Infrared's ethereal effect illuminates the otherworldly atmosphere that haunts ruins, allowing a photographer to transcend mere documentation and capture the elegiac beauty of crumbled walls, weathered facades and broken arches as no other format can.

In making these images, I expand on a tradition established by pioneering photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Claude Joseph Desire Charnay and William James Stillman, who first brought images of antiquities to the public. Now it’s my turn, using technology they never could have imagined, to respond to a question posed in 1855 by Abel Fletcher, a writer for the Photographic and Fine Art Journal. His query, a plea really, seems just as relevant now as it did then:

“Are not these monuments of former ages calling upon us, as artists, to come and secure their shadows by the pencil ray of Heaven, ere their crumbling forms shall pass away forever?”