Artist Statement

Yaphank feels different from much of Long Island. Beyond the traffic and development that define so much of the region, there remains a quieter, more rural landscape—old farms, weathered trucks, agricultural machinery, roadside stands, modest buildings, and objects that seem to have survived from another time.

I came to Yaphank looking for that landscape.

What interested me were not grand landmarks, but the things encountered almost accidentally along the road: an old farm truck partly hidden beneath the trees, a tractor and its implements, a vintage pickup still carrying the character of another era, an unusual piece of rusted machinery, a roadside honor stand, a small wooden shed, horseshoes welded into a structure, and other remnants of working rural life.

These objects are not presented as nostalgia. They have been used, repaired, abandoned, repurposed, and left behind. Their worn surfaces—the rust, faded paint, weathered wood, dents and imperfections—are part of their history.
In my photographs, I remove much of the contemporary landscape surrounding them and place the subjects within a simplified environment of dry grass and open sky. Roads, utility lines, trees, signs, buildings and other distractions disappear. What remains is the object itself.

Removed from its ordinary surroundings, a truck becomes almost sculptural. A piece of farm machinery becomes an artifact. A simple roadside structure can take on the presence of a monument.

Yaphank and Beyond is about discovering an older, quieter Long Island that still exists in fragments. It is a landscape of farms, machinery, roadside objects and working things—evidence of generations of people who built, repaired, planted, hauled and made do with what they had.

I am interested in those remnants precisely because they are ordinary.

They were never intended to become monuments.

The photographs simply give them the space to become one.

— Michael Domino
Port Jefferson, New York