I was born in Thunder Bay -- a remote city in northwestern Ontario in the heart of the Canadian Shield. I left when I was 16, but the place has left a lasting impression on how I see the world and how I translate that vision into photography.

As a boy, accompanying my father on long road trips related to his business, I grew to love the rugged and empty northwestern Ontario landscape that was dotted with signs of feeble-looking human intervention. A lonely gas station, a makeshift paper mill town, an abandoned gold mine, the single-lane TransCanada highway: they seemed puny against the backdrop of billion-year-old pre-Cambrian bedrock, the big lakes and rivers, and the legions of blackflies and mosquitoes that were such an urgent reminder of nature's power over man.

Those boyhood impressions stuck with me for life. Much of my photography attempts to convey the smallness, frailty and transience of man's work in relation to the indifferent grandeur of the natural world.