 Newburgh, New York |  Storm King, viewed from Cold Spring, New York |  Cold Spring Station, Cold Spring, New York |
|---|---|---|
 Sleepy Hollow, New York |  Cold Spring, New York |  Sleepy Hollow–Tarrytown Waterfront, New York |
 Sing Sing, Ossining, New York |  Kings Point Park, Tarrytown, New York |  Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx, New York |
 125th Street Station, New York City |
After living in Manhattan for 35 years and raising a family in the city, my husband and I moved to the Hudson Valley 12 years ago. I was never much of a commuter and had always walked to work. But now, I had a one-and-a-half-hour train ride along the Hudson River to get to my job at Parsons School of Design. Looking out the windows intrigued me, and I began paying closer attention to the towns, buildings, bridges, and industrial sites I passed each week. I wanted to understand more about their histories and their relationship to the river.
For centuries, the Hudson River has been a route for people and goods traveling through the region. Native peoples traveled and lived along its banks, and later shipping, manufacturing, commerce, and immigration shaped the towns that developed beside it. Today, the Metro-North Railroad follows the river for much of my commute, connecting many of these towns with New York City.
These photographs are not intended to be a literal record of the Hudson River Valley. Instead, they grew out of repeatedly seeing the same landscape from a moving train and noticing how traces of different periods exist alongside one another. Industrial buildings, bridges, older neighborhoods, newer development, and stretches of open river appear and disappear within seconds. The river and landscape became a way for me to think about how a place changes over time while still carrying visible evidence of what came before.
I began photographing the Hudson River from the window of the train during my weekly commute. What began as a way of recording what I saw gradually became a larger investigation into the history of the places I was passing. The photographs also became much more than digital images. Once back in my darkroom, I turned to historical photographic processes to connect the contemporary landscape I was photographing with earlier periods in the Hudson Valley’s history.
I first create wet plate collodion ambrotypes on glass, using a process developed in the nineteenth century, a period when industry, transportation, and development were rapidly changing the Hudson Valley. I then scan and enlarge the ambrotypes to create platinum/palladium prints. Each image moves through three distinct stages: a digital photograph made from a moving train, a wet plate image on glass, and a handmade platinum/palladium print. Using these older processes slows down and physically alters an image that was originally made in a fraction of a second.
The passing landscape became a fleeting collection of fragments: river, mountains, abandoned buildings, industrial remnants, bridges, small towns, and glimpses of life along the water. Seen through a moving window, these places were never completely still. The long exposures record some of that movement as blur and softness rather than freezing the landscape in perfect detail. Instead of correcting those qualities, I allow them to remain visible in the finished photographs.
The Hudson Valley has experienced continual cycles of growth, decline, abandonment, and renewal. Towns that once depended on manufacturing, shipping, and industry lost many of those economic foundations, and over time, buildings and industrial sites were abandoned or repurposed. More recently, some of these communities have changed again as artists, families, and new businesses have arrived. I am interested in photographing the Hudson Valley at this point in that continuing process, when evidence of its industrial past, periods of decline, and more recent redevelopment can often be seen within the same landscape.