Artist Statement

When I first encountered Hangar B at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, I was overwhelmed with the haunting energy of the crumbling building. I wasn’t sure why: I had never been interested in decrepit urban buildings before or any photographer’s depictions of them. Departing from my traditional documentary work, I found myself helplessly infatuated with the abandoned airplane hangars. I began shooting there religiously, several times each week. The weeks ran into one long stain of time.

In the beginning, I chose not to analyze my attraction and strange familiarity with the buildings. Instead, I simply submitted to a heartfelt kinship with the space. During my first few weeks there, I learned how to listen to the invisible stories that lay amidst the piles of rubble and fallen ceiling. The forgotten airport became a place of reclamation for me, personally as well as artistically. All around the looming spaces crept beautiful manifestations of the natural world, exerting a subtle yet all-powerful grip. The horrible crumples of the failed and forgotten airport had been reclaimed by the slow cycle of death, progressing at the congruous speed of rebirth.

This odd love affair is one I continue to have with Hangar B and her dying sister construction, Hangar A. I sneak in to photograph, regularly getting kicked out for being in the “unsafe” area inside the structures. The act of photographing the space gradually became a ritual and a tradition, as well as an urgent form of worshipful documentation. Each silent, staunch building is slated to be gutted in order to make way for basketball courts and ice skating rinks. Construction has already started on Hangar A, marking the start to the creation of a permanent absence. After their deaths, the buildings will remain only in photographs.