In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts more than six million residents occupy only 7838 square miles of land. Humans suffuse the landscape, creating a mosaic of housing, farmland, and natural space. I travel to see and photograph what our built environment in this narrow sliver of America looks like and how we relate to our natural spaces and to each other. Most of my recent work examines tensions and transitions at the nexus of different land uses.

A scarcity of land available for new development in Massachusetts (partly the result of peculiar zoning regulations) has driven up the price of traditional suburban homesteads, both old and new. But the desire for home ownership and the dream of social mobility remains untempered by the high cost, leading many new homeowners to look at lots once considered marginal. For instance, a surprising number of upwardly mobile suburbanites have built their starter dream homes abutting power line corridors, sometimes with the poles in their front yards. The “High Tension” series is an on-going visual exploration of what happens when NIMBY meets an actual backyard.