These photographs were made in the basement of Prentis Hall on 125th street in Manhattan. The building is used by Columbia MFA students for classes and studios. The basement of what was originally built as a dairy is full of abandoned equipment from its days as a Heat Transfer research facility (for use in nuclear power stations).
I wanted to produce a small self-contained body of work specifically for the MFA First Years show that was related to my first year of grad school, and the mysteries of Prentis Hall proved to be an ideal subject. To remain undetected, I quietly took to the closed off areas several evenings after midnight with my 8x10 Deardorff in tow. Due to the low lighting, most of the exposures were at least five minutes in duration.
The first two photographs show a hole in Catherine Czacki’s studio that connects the basement to the studio floors above. Catherine and I decided to work together to produce a 60 page booklet that addressed the rumors and facts about what the building had been used for over the years. We gave away the booklet during the show.
