Patterson says the idea came to him

Patterson says the idea came to him during “a family reunion at the ranch in Montana where my grandmother grew up. There was an old barn that her father, a ranch hand, was commissioned to build on the ranch. That barn was later moved about 60 miles away onto another ranch. All that is left at the original homestead is three walls of the house where she grew up with her four brothers.”

His first image in the series, Red Barn was inspired by this relocated old family barn. Patterson says “the background image is on the original homestead and the image of the barn is from its current location.” He says that making this image “brought up stories of what it was like to live on that ranch, the choices that were made, living off the land, and eventually migrating away from the ranch. That is really only scratching the surface, but nonetheless it led me to search through the old family albums. The ones that usually we dread going through. The way the story came through successfully in that first image caused me to search for more connections visually and led to a lot of the other images.” In the final product, some of the layered images are old photographs, some are new.