I grew up hearing stories about an America that existed before I was born. Through old time radio tapes that my parents gave me, tales my maternal grandfather told me about the pharmacies and lunchstands he owned in New York and Florida, and trips with my father to his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, I caught a sense of what America once looked like, an image quite different from what I saw in my suburban neighborhood near Boston.

This interest in what America looked like in these stories, where my myth of America was formed -its cars, long roads, drive through restaurants, bold signs etc.- has fueled my photography for over five years. I studied how other phototgraphers and painters had captured their visions of America, and I wanted to show mine. The fulfillment of this nostalgic urge has been my primary interest in art making.

In the Winter of 1998, I challenged myself to find a new way of printing my photographs. I was dissatisfied with printing directly from the negative. No matter how much control I was able to gain over my color, exposure, and the size of my images, my photographs were not yet a realization of my vision -- how I saw things in my mind.

I discovered that a photograph, printed digitally from a ink-jet printer onto non-adhesive acetate, then rubbed out onto board, had an aesthetic quality that matched my internal vision. The ink-transfer process that I use obscures the details of my images, but retains the forms and colors that I react to when I look at a particular scene. The weathered, faded quality in these images, corresponds directly to my internal vision. Printed like this, a street in New Bedford could just as easily be a street in White Plains, an Acura could be a Toyota, 1998 could be 1972. The irony is that I am using a printing process that did not exist a few years ago (the technology was not there), yet the result looks old, like a relic from the times I want to recreate. The use of panels (if you look closely at the examples here, you'll see seams) has allowed me to make my pictures huge, some over 6 feet tall.