The only artwork my family owned when I was growing up was a Thomas Kinkade wall calendar that remained permanently open to November, 1996. The image, The End of a Perfect Day II, depicts a cabin near a river with an eager dog in the foreground awaiting the arrival of a paddling of ducks. Despite the calm facade, I always had the distinct feeling that this image captures a moment just before a dark, life-altering entity enters the frame. My father was a police officer who primarily communicated through a series of grunts, eye rolls, and coded gestures. On rare occasions, when something he witnessed at work was too momentous to bury, he recounted scenes of devastation and loss at the dinner table. He would fixate on the setting and the arrangement of objects: the uncanny shape of a car's front end after impact or intricate burn patterns on wood and metal. The cause always remained undescribed or unnamed. And nothing breeds anxiety like the unknown.

In Gone to the Dogs, the ongoing series of photographs I am submitting with this application, I try to confront the power of the unseen. The images are black and white, tightly cropped, and lack information about place and setting, eliminating a sense of space and time. The series tells human stories through abandoned spaces. Within them, a viewer can become lured by the space's ghostly former inhabitants, trapped under the gravity of a building's design logic, and thrust into an image that portends a dystopian future in which these spaces serve as relics of an idealized time before successive disasters made the earth uninhabitable for humanity. I was born and raised in the capital region of New York—a decaying, former major industrial center evidenced by a host of abandoned structures and a haunting sense of the presence of the people who once inhabited them. People who operated as a small part of a giant economic enterprise. People who remained isolated from each other and from the impact of their work. People no longer present. These structures—offices, factories, warehouses, regional corporate headquarters—were once centers of coercive productivity. In the absence of workers, these spaces are now divorced from their original function, and the social isolation embedded in their design becomes clear.