M.W. LaFary: DECLINE

Working strictly with film and manual equipment, M. W. LaFary began a journey in 2010 to explore and document a growing phenomenon. The visual urban landscape of Indianapolis, along with many American cities, was showing distressful signs of systematic decay and deterioration. With thousands of once occupied Indianapolis homes and businesses boarded-up and overgrown, and just months before the foreclosure crisis would empty thousands more, a new series of work was born.

DECLINE seeks to document and reflect upon the growing signs of trouble in the local landscape. LaFary has traveled a great deal of central and southern Indiana and even into northern Kentucky exploring abandoned, boarded, or otherwise disregarded spaces. The body of work has grown to include hundreds of exposures made at dozens of sites, many of which no longer exist. For LaFary, this vast collection of images is the story of everything. It is the story of the end.