The photographs that follow offer a glimpse into a bike trip I took during the summer of 2014 from Cambridge, MA. to Aliquippa, PA., just north of Pittsburgh. The ride covered approximately eight-hundred miles in eleven days and I was accompanied by Beth, across Massachusetts, and my father from Albany to my grandma's house in Aliquippa. While the main attraction was meant to be the three-hundred mile corridor of the old Erie Canal, I found my attention piqued by the cultural and natural margins that surround this now abandoned and swampy pathway. The working infrastructure, industrial ruins, and varied architecture that punctuates this landscape seems stranded without the rail and canal networks that once enabled the region to thrive. Such features are often out of sight when traveling by highway and I recommend the pace and labor of bike travel to anyone who wants to grapple with the scale and material of this environment.

My medium of choice when traveling is film photography and the compact Fuji 645 medium-format camera has the perfect size, durability and automation for bike work. Though one has to be patient to see the results, both the quality of images and the excitement of making discoveries weeks later make film worth the wait.

A selection of my photographs and the above write-up—which now reads as strangely formal and pretentious, but I didn't feel like changing it—appear in the second issue of The Graduate Journal of Food Studies.




Brookfield, Massachusetts






Winsor Dam at Quabbin Reservoir, MA






Windsor State Forest, MA






Pownal, Vermont






The Hudson River, Cohoes, New York




The Mohawk River, Niskayuna, N.Y.








Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation, Canajoharie, N.Y.




East Canada Creek, East Creek, N.Y.






Little Falls, N.Y.










Ledge Road, Corfu, N.Y.






Lake Shore Drive, Dunkirk, N.Y.






Green Hills, N.Y.






Andover, Ohio








Williamsfield, OH










Patagonia, Pennsylvania




Pulaski, PA.






The Ohio River, PA