I don’t take pictures to make things look pretty.
I take pictures because some things deserve to be remembered the way they really were when I found them—broken, discarded, forgotten about.

My work is about the spaces people leave behind—the silence after the machines stop, the stories still stitched into the rust and the dust.
It’s about the small, human moments hiding in the wreckage.

I’m not interested in saving anything, though if I truly had the means, I would probably feel differently.
I’m interested in standing still long enough to hear what the walls have to say, even if nobody else is listening anymore.

I photograph what’s left—because sometimes what’s left is the most honest thing we have.

—Emily Pratt Slatin