One summer, my grandfather gave me the camera he used to photograph when he was in Britain, serving for the United States in World War II. It is a Voightlander Bessa 66. It takes an obsolete film stock, but I found that 120 film will slip in if you push a little. I played around and developed some film, and fell in love with the way the camera rendered the world. I just had no use for it as a photographer.

A year or so later, I was driving home at 3:00 in the morning on a snowy night, and passed over the bridge to the town I live just outside of. The previous week's blizzard had melted during the past few days, and had filled the river below me over its flood line. I parked the car and walked across the bridge, the only one on it, the only one who would see me fall in. The water would normally be around thirty feet below the bridge deck, but tonight it was only five feet. The rush of the water underneath made the entire structure quiver with twinges of mechanical doubt. A few minutes later, a snow plow rumbled by me, seeming to take the bridge's load right up to capacity, shaking it up and down beneath my feet. I had never felt so alive and so close to being swallowed.

This night moved me, and in the following weeks my photographic subject became the water and its aftermath. These Riverbed pictures are fragments of what was left behind from that night.