The Catskills in many ways were the true genesis of my love for abandoned places, and photography. As a fifteen-year old, I discovered many of the abandoned Borscht Belt Resorts amongst this now forgotten region of New York, and this led to me taking many trips with my parents to explore these interesting places. While exploring, I made friends who were also traveling around the area exploring and photographing the many abandoned places around the Catskills, and this led to the beginning of my true love and interest in exploring abandoned places all over as my new friends had been documenting abandoned places all around the East Coast for quite some time. Since then, I begun to learn to do research, and discover places that I could explore, and photograph with my primary focus of documentation becoming former State Psychiatric Institutions, leaving the Catskills in the dust. However, with time going by, something was missing. The piece of me that I needed to revisit was the me who was found in the Catskills, the me who saw something amazing that was new to me became curious. And with this, I recently set out to revisit many of the abandoned places around the Catskills that I started off exploring. Only now, I would have a different eye in photography than the fifteen-year old me had, and this would completely reshape how I see the places that I would be visiting. Many Iconic abandoned resorts throughout the Catskills have since suffered great amount of vandalism with some major fires blazing through the long-dilapidated structures leaving the majority destroyed. With this being said, my experience traveling and photographing these places in the Catskills would be different than before, now with less to explore, and familiar places being destroyed. However, this made for a challenge for me to travel, and explore as many abandoned places across the region as I could to find photos that I would feel to be worth taking in 2025. Throughout my many recent trips around the Catskills, I have photographed remains of abandoned resorts, houses, bungalows, roadside finds, etc. But I also spent time exploring the wilderness, local towns, and overall working to experience, and capture the Catskill region as a whole, and by expanding my mindset on these trips, I found myself taking photos of many things I wouldn’t have found interest in when I first started exploring around the Catskills. The Catskills are my beginning, and I hope to continue to set out to find inspiration across this incredible region.