Most of the photographs in this book date from 1976 to 1983, with a scattering in later years up to 2018. Many come from lunch-hour walks into the alleys and passageways of Northwest Washington, D.C. Others I took either during trips away from home or on drives around the suburbs of Northern Virginia.
Many of the scenes depicting drab mundanity often appeared to me as color abstractions. I sought to give order to a seeming chaos, to relate things unrelated except by accident. Intended as such or not, all of the scenes struck me some kind of communication—signs and signals testifying to an indelible human presence.
In my wanderings through the alleys of Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia, it was important for me to record places I knew would eventually vanish in the myst of history, victims to urban renewal—or simply disappear for no apparent reason. But perhaps my main preoccupation were the often anomalous juxtapositions of form and color that gave rise to my compositions.