The Nugents, desperados who once ran Franklin County, PA, lived like ghosts in plain sight, slipping through every crack in the system while carrying the certainty that everyone around them wanted them gone. It was reckless, desperate, and somehow heroic. I keep looking for that kind of figure today, not just a lawbreaker, but someone who presses against the boundaries of place and expectation, testing what holds and what breaks. That tension, between presence and invisibility, runs through my photographs, surfacing in the spaces where people and landscapes negotiate power, belonging, and identity.

  Angelo and his brother Lorenzo once worked for my father, long before I understood who they were. Eventually, they returned to rural Pennsylvania. Lorenzo to a small organic farm with his growing family, Angelo to a decaying hotel he’s transformed into a postmodern blend of studio, garden, and home. Like the Nugents, like the children I photograph, like Bryan and myself, we all move through landscapes that offer both welcome and confinement. There’s something undeniably American about that contradiction, something restless and unresolved, even if none of us are quite ready to admit it.