I am a poet, professor, photographer living in rural East Texas.  I began taking the dress photos about a year ago after a health scare prompted me to buy a Canon dslr camera and get outside into the natural world.  The images of the dresses in the abandoned places came to me in the same way that images come to me for my poems, and I just followed them.  I see them in a way as ghosts.  The dresses are a physical artifact of the unknown lives lived in them–by setting the dresses against the abandoned houses and in the wilds of nature, I hope to have the viewer think on and recall those lives.  The captions that go with the photographs are what I see once I am finished.  Being a writer, for me the captions have become a story, a narrative, in which the lives of my “girls” as I have come to call my dresses are unfolding.