Artist Statement

Machines That Worked the Land is a photographic study of the tractors, graders, crawlers, and agricultural machinery that once transformed the American landscape.

These machines were built for work, not beauty. They pulled plows, graded roads, moved earth, cleared fields, and carried generations of farmers through long days of physical labor. Their worn steel, fading paint, exposed gears, battered wheels, and advancing rust now record that history as clearly as any written document.
I photograph these machines apart from the clutter of the places where I find them, placing them against an open, spare landscape. By isolating them, I want the viewer to see each machine not simply as discarded equipment, but as an individual object—almost a piece of industrial sculpture.

Rust is especially important to this series. It is evidence of age, weather, abandonment and time, but it also reveals extraordinary surfaces and colors. Machines that were once valued entirely for what they could accomplish have acquired a different kind of presence after their working lives have ended.

The occasional barn or gathering of machinery broadens that story. These objects belonged to a larger agricultural world—a landscape of fields, buildings, labor and mechanical ingenuity that is steadily disappearing.

Machines That Worked the Land is not intended as nostalgia. It is a record of survival and transformation: portraits of machines that helped shape the land and now, standing silent upon it, have become monuments to the work they once performed.

— Michael Domino
Port Jefferson, New York