Around the world, Silicon Valley is a symbol of technological advancement and financial opportunity—a place defined by products and profits. But it is also a place where people live. In this series of photographs, I explore the ongoing transformation of the landscape that has been my home for more than a dozen years.
 
Silicon Valley is a land of extremes, a stage on which to watch the push and pull of progress and destruction. As I drive through Silicon Valley— its neat rows of houses, glass-enclosed office buildings, slightly out-of-date strip malls and grid locked highways—I look for visual clues to explain the way economic changes are shaping our values, our motivations and our relationships. I am interested in what we build, what we buy, what we discard.
 
The landscape of Silicon Valley is in constant flux. I keep my camera and tripod next to me as I drive, and I have learned never to let a photograph wait. More than once I have gone back a few days later to a place that intrigued me, only to find that the house or office building was no longer there. In its place a deep hole had been excavated, ready for the next foundation to be poured.
 
For me Silicon Valley is at the same time both an intensely personal and iconic place, my home as well as a strange and foreign land. Made over the past four years of boom and bust, together these photographs tell the story of a specific moment in the history of this region. They are, in part, an attempt to grab a fleeting instant, a disappearing geography. But they are not made out of a longing for what used to be. Instead, these images are created with an eye to the future, to a landscape that might be. They are meant neither to glorify Silicon Valley’s innovations, nor to condemn its excesses, but simply to point out the choices we made along the way. Some believe Silicon Valley is a model to be replicated. Others think that it is a warning we must heed. Above all, it shows us the future, and in doing so gives each of us a chance to decide.