Artist Statement – The Geography of Loss

Grief leaves traces on the landscape.

Along roadsides, at the edges of highways, beside rural intersections and city streets, memorials appear where lives have ended suddenly and unexpectedly. Often overlooked, these sites transform ordinary places into spaces of remembrance. Together, they create a geography shaped by loss.

For more than twenty-five years, I have worked in the field of road safety, communicating the consequences of traffic fatalities and working with families whose lives have been altered by sudden loss. The Geography of Loss emerged from a desire to understand how grief inhabits a place and how acts of remembrance endure long after public attention has faded.

The memorials I photograph are created by families and friends. Flowers, photographs, handwritten notes, crosses, and personal objects become markers of lives that continue to matter. Though the individuals are absent, evidence of love remains. These memorials stand as quiet declarations that a person once lived, was cherished, and is not forgotten.

This project is not about the moment of death. It is about what remains afterward. It explores the relationship between absence and presence, forgetting and remembrance, private grief and public space. The memorials reveal how mourning becomes visible within the landscape, creating places where memory endures.

In photographing these sites, I hope to honor both those who are remembered and those who continue the work of remembering. Together, these memorials form a map of human loss that often goes unseen, yet remains woven into the American landscape.