CHILDREN OF TROY


I began photographing these children in the early 2000s while working on Growing Up Fast, my book and documentary film about teenage parents in nearby post-industrial Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The questions that shaped that project — generational inheritance, economic contraction, narrowing opportunity — extended to Troy, a small city on the Hudson River.

Once among the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States, it earned the name “Collar City” for its textile and iron industries. The Hudson River, the Erie Canal, rail lines, and mills once carried goods and ambition outward. The brick facades remain; the systems that sustained them do not.

The children in these photographs move through that inheritance.

They walk beside former foundries and vacant lots. A boy stands on broken asphalt holding a shoe. Others balance along drainage embankments, climbing down to retrieve what has fallen or simply to play at the water’s edge. They ride bicycles past monumental brick architecture built during a different era of promise.

In these images, bodies blur against structures that do not.

The city was engineered for motion — river, canal, rail — systems designed to carry expansion forward. What remains are children negotiating scale; small bodies against large histories, in a landscape built for movement that has fallen still.