I am the kinkeeper. The last one who knows the stories, the one who holds not only the photos and relics, but also the memories shared by my grandmother and her cousin. Five generations of my family were born and buried in the high desert of the American West — mining towns of Bodie, Virginia City, Bridgeport, Masonic, Reno and Yerington. They were sheriffs and cowboys, seamstresses and postmistresses, teachers and firefighters, orphaned boys who ran away and became something. I have been photographing what remains of their world since 1995. But I hold images that are much, much older. This is not nostalgia. It is witness.
There are places that hold the spirit of those who lived there. Cousin Alice kept her house in Bridgeport like a museum of her own life — every object in its place, every room a memory. When she died the preserving stopped. I was there to document it, and when she passed, every negative, photo, film and letter my family found was set into a pile in the front room of the Dolan house and given to me. In October of 2025 I put them on a boat and moved them with me to France, where I now reside in Nice.
The archive spans 170 years — daguerreotypes, glass plates, film, handwritten letters, artifacts of daily life in communities the world has largely forgotten. My own large format 4x5 photography places contemporary images of these landscapes and what remains in direct dialogue with what Alice and those before her preserved. The work is not reconstruction. It is conversation — between the living and the dead, between the land as it was and as it stands now, between memory held in a body and memory held in silver and light.
The LOBA grant would fund the critical next phase of this project: the professional digitization and conservation of this irreplaceable archive, and the continuation of fieldwork in the Eastern Sierra. Without intervention, these materials — some of the only visual records of these communities — will not survive another generation.
Homecoming, for me, is not a return to somewhere safe. It is a return to what is still standing, and a reckoning with what is not. It is driving through a town so small you can look down and miss it, knowing your people are in the ground there, knowing you are the last one who remembers why that matters. It is a pile of wood and rock on a hill where I buried my grandmother's ashes.
It is the last place I call home.
