The parking lot outside is empty and ice-covered and a storm is blowing into the Canisteo Valley in Western New York, sending wisps of snow across the asphalt. I’m talking inside with Erick, a twentysomething motel clerk and aspiring comic book artist. Erick has spent his whole life in this town, Hornell. I get the impression he spends most days behind his desk staring out at the frozen parking lot, fantasizing about a comic book character of his he calls Brimstone, who he tells me all about. Erick describes Brimstone as an antihero inhabiting a fantasy universe full of volcanoes and dinosaurs and hidden lairs. A man of the people, he says. Erick forged him from the same political anger and sense of isolation that then directs him on a conspiracy theory-ridden screed about the government shutdown in the winter of 2018-2019; he makes this clear when he abruptly transitions from one topic to the other, likening Brimstone -- his devil-may-care gusto, how he challenges society -- to President Trump. I left my talk with Erick thinking, 'That’s the feeling I want to photograph here.' I wanted this resulting project, "Brimstone," to help me understand Erick and the shroud that has fallen over formerly prosperous farming or industrial towns in Upstate New York. Erick’s disposition, his youth, his quiet desolation speak deeply to the conditions that have created our current political climate -- and the chance of their perpetuity. I was especially inspired by the prescient novels of John Updike, particularly the grim social realism of his "Rabbit" series. We see many photo projects about poverty-stricken areas in the Rust Belt, the Deep South, Appalachia, etc., and attempts to locate the schisms in American life there; Upstate New York remains relatively undercovered. (Trump did win 45 out of 62 counties in New York, some dominantly.) So on winter mornings, with the temperatures often in single digits, I would take my pocket camera, drive into the countryside, and begin to wander. "Brimstone" resulted -- a meditation on economic disenfranchisement and social isolation in Upstate New York and an attempt to forge compassion from loneliness, to understand how we can begin to heal.