In the late 1980's I was a grad student living on the edge of an industrial wasteland along the Oakland - Emeryville - Berkeley border.  Riding my bike to and from all the different jobs I had kept me up to date on developments in local graffiti. Sometimes on weekends I went out to record it with my camera:

Was it this graffiti that started my obsession with photographing urban industrial areas?  When I was little, I did not dream of moving to a dirty, violent, noisy lower income-neighborhood to take pictures of factory walls.  If anything, I was thinking more along the lines of moving to a large country estate to be a rich eccentric recluse scholar.

The graffiti that kept appearing in the otherwise almost completely bleak landscape around me seemed significant and mysterious, like Ivan Karamazov's sticky green buds.

They were all similar in style.  A figure chasing something heart- (or garbage-) shaped that had leapt from their chest region.  Did this make sense?