The Slow Unmaking — Project Statement
Rose Dugan-Henriksen

The Slow Unmaking is a series of analog film photographs about what happens after people leave. I photograph abandoned buildings in New England — houses, mills, barns — and the way nature moves back in once we're gone. Vines through broken windows, moss on floorboards, trees growing through roofs.

I shoot everything on film because the process is slow, the way these places are slow. Film forces me to stand still and look. Developing it myself, watching an image come up in the tray, feels like the opposite of forgetting.

These buildings were somebody's everything once. Now they're coming apart, and something green is always taking over. I'm not trying to make them look sad. I think there's something hopeful in it — proof that things keep going, that the world doesn't end when we walk away.

The Slow Unmaking is about that in-between: not quite gone, not quite alive, still becoming something.