I’ve long been drawn to the Hudson River Valley, a place where landscape and history are inseparable. You can’t walk in the woods without stumbling across remnants: the wall of a Revolutionary War redoubt, a megalithic iron forge, a stone fence winding among the trees.

I’m inspired by the paintings of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School. Realistic though they may appear, I believe these canvasses draw as much upon memory or nostalgia as upon nature; after all, the eastern forest was fast receding before the plow even as Cole and Church painted it. Likewise, the Hudson Valley of my photographs is a ghostly place – haunted by the ancient forests that once stood, the fortifications guarding the river, the forgotten mining villages of the Highlands, the ruined castles of robber barons, the foundations of Victorian hotels atop Catskill ridges; and everywhere the stone fences, winding willy-nilly, dividing pastures long gone.

Shooting a series of exposures from a fixed position over the course of several hours, I capture an array of weather, lighting and atmospheric effects. Later in the studio, I fuse these exposures into a seamless whole. Faithful to no particular moment, the image represents a wash of time. Yet I believe there is a sense of moment in my pictures – not a moment in nature, but in recollection – a fleeting sense of something on the cusp of being remembered. My Hudson Valley is observed out of time, suspended between landscape and memory.