For audiences unfamiliar with the materiality of vinyl, some historical context is useful. The Long Play (LP) record, introduced by Columbia Records in 1948 under the direction of inventor Peter Goldmark, represented a technological and cultural shift in the consumption of music. Spinning at 33 ⅓ revolutions per minute and cut with exceptionally fine grooves, the LP offered approximately thirty minutes of uninterrupted sound per side—an innovation that reshaped listening practices and extended the temporal possibilities of recorded music.

Slab City, on the edge of Niland in Southern California, has served as a fertile ground for photographic inquiry. The central body of work, Desert Pieces, has in turn generated several satellite projects—My Own Personal Alien, Junk, When the Music Died, and Parts—each extending the thematic and material concerns of the primary series.

The Sonoran Desert surrounding Slab City operates as both landscape and archive, a terrain where detritus accumulates and, over time, acquires new significance. Much like the process of panning for gold, combing the desert floor reveals unexpected artifacts amidst the discarded and the overlooked. The origin of this particular series lies in the discovery of a sun-bleached, decaying box of LPs—objects once carriers of culture and memory, now transformed by climate, neglect, and exposure.

The records and their sleeves bore the marks of their environment: torn and fragmented covers, pigments drained by the desert sun, labels discolored and barely legible, grooves scarred by wind-driven sand and encroaching vegetation. These surfaces, once designed to preserve and transmit sound, now carry the visible inscription of time and entropy. In the work, these distressed LPs are reanimated as masks, worn by the “slabbers”—residents of Slab City who embody the improvisational, transient spirit of the community. Their presence situates the found objects within a living context, allowing the photographs to oscillate between documentation, portraiture, and metaphor.