Road to the Midwest

Documentary landscapes and built environments across the American Great Plains

Road to the Midwest is a long-term documentary project focusing on rural regions across the American Great Plains — vast prairie landscapes where agriculture, infrastructure, and daily life unfold within immense open space.

The work engages with both active and abandoned structures such as grain elevators, barns, rail lines, gas stations, schools, churches, roadside buildings, and farms. Many of these sites have stood for more than a century. Some remain in daily use; others have fallen out of function yet persist as physical records of earlier lives and economies. Across the Plains, architecture reflects continuity as much as change.

The openness of the prairie is both strikingly beautiful and quietly demanding. Its scale reveals distance and isolation, but also resilience. Within this environment, built structures become markers of endurance — shaped by climate, labor, and shifting economic realities.

Rather than isolating ruins or romanticizing decline, the photographs observe how places endure, evolve, and remain in use. By looking at landscapes outside curated narratives and tourist economies, the project seeks to foster a more nuanced understanding of how communities live within and shape their environments — in the past as well as in the present.

Photographed exclusively on medium format film.