City Methodist Church

Gary, Indiana

I built my first pinhole camera - my beloved Cocoa box - while studying photography at Columbia College Chicago in the mid 1990s. This church had been vacant for about 15 years at that point and was in a stunning state of disrepair. It was the ideal environment for my first pinhole tests; full of texture and architectural interest. Despite the large windows, my camera required long exposures - typically 5 minutes or more - resulting in delightfully ghostly images as I shivered before the camera.

There was such poetry in that decay.