When most of us think of rural landscapes, we think of hillsides, rolling farms, tractors and hay wagons. Those are beautiful things, and I love to photograph them. But the life of the rural landscape, like the real lives of animals, is not pastoral or pristine much of the time. It is raw, changing, beautiful in its abandonment and struggle. When I drive through the rural landscape, as I did together, I see a beautiful place and a lost place, the roads dotted with for sale signs, collapsed barns, shuttered businesses. Rural life does not seem to fit in the scheme of economists, or the global economy, or the things politicians seem to talk about. It is becoming beautiful to me, and I am drawn to trying to capture it.