The Edge of Empire and other stories...

Four artists take a different look at the contemporary world we now live in...here's an excerpt from Weld by Tom Walker...

In 2008, after more than a decade in New York City, I moved to Windsor, Colorado, my wife's hometown. The move from densely populated Queens to a small but booming bedroom community I'd visited only on holidays was jarring. New York had been the dream of my younger self. Windsor was in the throes of massive growth, expanding three times its size in a decade to nearly twenty thousand people. Like so many, I was trading in a personal dream to make something better for my family of three with one on the way.

After a year, I found myself out of work. While searching for a new job and simultaneously wrestling with the idea of chucking it all to take up photography full-time, I began making eastward car trips into Weld County. For hours at a time I drove past farmlands, feed lots, isolated housing developments and through the withering farm towns of Greeley, Eaton, Ault and Severance. Though a Colorado native, I was born an eight-hour drive away in the desert mountains of the Southwest. This was unfamiliar land. Pointing a camera at the flat Colorado grasslands was a way to accommodate myself to a new and unfamiliar home.

Click on the photo to look at each artist's work, enjoy.