They speak to May.

That is why I explored California's old mining country in search of abandoned towns in the fall of 2013.

The loss remnants of the past move me.

I am enchanted by evidence of lives once lived dissolving into the landscape.

I thought that the subject matter would translate well to my medium of choice the monotype, the monotype of the unique form of printmaking.

Because it yields only a single image.

To create the monotype, I paint with ink onto a sheet of acid Tate.

I then put that painting side down onto a piece of large paper, run it through the press and the imprint that the ink leaves is my final image.

I didn't want my prints to be repeatable, because the beauty of these towns lies in their impermanence, fleeting and evocative images of a moment in time that I tried to capture on paper in this photograph.

Well, caught my eye.

We're not the buildings but the fence posts hidden in the center foreground.

This is what I saw.

Sometimes unassuming details are the most powerful.

As an artist, I hope to these towns and the process of re imagining my photographs might spark my imagination and that they might help me reframe the way that I look at the world.

This is Bodie, Calif.

In 18 77 10,000 people called this place home.

It was a booming mining town, producing tens of millions of dollars worth of gold.

There was a schoolhouse, a Chinatown, a red light district and more than 60 saloons.

Body busted as fast is a boomed as the cost of extracting the or became too expensive.

Miners left the town in search of other opportunities.

Today, these buildings and the abandoned car are all that stand in this year and about a mountain range.

This is Ransford, California It is located in the Mojave Desert and in 18 97 had a population of more than 3000.

Like body, it was a mining town that attracted a rush of people who wanted to get rich.

Quick.

Over 50 minds were developed in Ramsburg.

It quickly became one of the largest mining towns in California's high desert.

Like many mining towns in the high desert, Ramsburg suffers from a lack of water, which was wildly expensive to haul in.

But there was so much gold to be mined that the town was prosperous.

For more than 20 years, Ramsburg thrived until nature took over.

The settlement was devastated by two major fires in 1903 and then again in 1929.

The high desert Xiahe graffiti propelled strong winds, which fueled the flames that engulf Rance Berg's wouldn't homes.

The fires could not be contained by the limited water supply.

Between the lack of water and ultimate depletion of the mines.

Gold ramsburg became unlivable.

Today the town is basically abandoned and this is Garlock.

Garlic was a milling point for mining towns in the Mojave, meaning that it processed and distributed the gold that was dug up in the surrounding area.

It also had the essential role of providing its water to desert mining towns like Ramsburg.

At its height, it was hauling over 800 barrels of water a day out of wells that were over 210 feet deep.

Its existence depended on these other mining towns, so when they died out in the early 19 hundreds, soda Garlock.

Today all that remains are a few decaying buildings and a dried up water tower.

After visiting these abandoned towns, I began to wonder.

How many places are like this?

Once thriving, now abandoned, it's hard to get an exact count of how many ghost towns exist today because there are so many in California, there are more than 600 ghost sounds.

In Arizona, there are more than 275 Colorado 300 plus, and in Nevada there are more than 530 Ghost town.

They're everywhere.

Some are famous, many for gotten.

All are examples of once thriving communities that lost their economic reason for being and the resources to sustain them.

Ghost towns are so haunting to me because I imagine them as they once were, alive and booming.

Now, dead people were forced to pick up their lives to migrate to other opportunities in search of something new that could sustain them.

The town's abandonment speaks to us about the transitory nature of these places that we inhabit as people migrated to other opportunities.

What they left behind connects us the stories of a different time.

But although it was a different time, what if these stories contain valuable lessons about our future When I first got the idea of traveling to different ghost towns, I expected to be transported to the past.

But these abandoned town surprised me because they really launched me into questions about our future and made me realize how fleeting these places are that we perceive is permanent.

They make me wonder How many ghost towns are we in the process of creating today?

Thank you.