Artist Statement

I have always been drawn to things that have outlived their intended purpose.
Across Long Island and beyond, old cars, farm trucks, fire vehicles and working machines remain scattered in fields, behind buildings and along forgotten roads. Once essential, they have been left to weather slowly. Paint peels away. Metal oxidizes. Parts disappear. Grass rises around them. What remains is often more visually compelling to me than the object was when it was new.

DECAY. CORROSION. RUST. brings these vehicles together and removes them from the clutter of their original surroundings. I place them within a spare, recurring landscape of open ground and subdued sky. By stripping away distractions, each vehicle becomes less a piece of discarded machinery and more an individual portrait.
I am not interested in restoring these objects. Their deterioration is the subject.
Rust records time. A missing headlight, collapsed grille, shattered windshield or corroded body tells us that these machines have had lives. Trucks that once carried crops, equipment, barrels or firefighters now stand motionless. Automobiles built for movement gradually settle into the earth.

There is beauty in that contradiction.

Throughout the series, the vehicles move between strength and disappearance. Some remain massive and imposing. Others are skeletal, broken or nearly swallowed by the landscape. The final images approach something quieter: machines surrendering to the ground around them.

These photographs are not intended as nostalgia for old automobiles and trucks. They are portraits of endurance, abandonment and transformation—and of the strange beauty that can emerge when time is allowed to finish what people have left behind.

— Michael Domino