'Paving Ground'

These photographs are made within my family’s asphalt paving business, where I represent the third generation in the trade. The work is produced during the course of the job—between tasks, during pauses, or on the fringes of the site.

The physical language of paving holds my attention: aggregate piles, broken asphalt, chalk lines, heavy machinery, and the gestures required to shape and reconstruct the road. What is often encountered as inconvenience or obstruction is, from within, a structured and deliberate process. Surfaces are measured, excavated, layered, and compacted. Roads are temporary by nature, subject to weather and traffic, perpetually laid down and broken apart.

Equally important are the people who carry out this work. The men I work alongside bring years of knowledge, repetition, and endurance to each site. Their movements are precise and economical; their pauses are as telling as their labor. The job site operates as a contained world with its own hierarchies, humor, rhythms, and shared understanding. Photographing from within that space allows me to record not just the surface of the road, but the human presence embedded in it.

Photographing in black and white allows me to focus on form, weight, and contrast—the dark mass of fresh asphalt against open sky, steam rising from hot mix, tire marks pressed into soft surface. This work considers labor not as spectacle but as inheritance and material transformation. The landscape is not fixed; it is constructed, maintained, and altered by hand. Through these photographs, I am examining the ground beneath our movement and my place within the history and community that shape it.