The picture above has to be one of my best (if not the best).

I spent most of my time in college taking photographs. I loved it. I would travel around Greensboro, High-Point, Winston-Salem, Danville (anywhere in the Piedmont),  snapping anything that I could find. It was liberating – it made me fearless.

This one particular day, I headed out to the abandoned Revolution Mill in Greensboro. This mill served as one of the main industries in the city for more than 75 years. Like most textile factories in the south, it closed in the early 1980s.

We walked the entire ins and outs of this place. It was like a castle. Stairs, Railroad tracks, moat, maybe even a dragon. At this point, the complex had been vacant for nearly 25 years. Even in its dilapidation, I still could feel the vibrancy of the mill. I imagined people working; mill-worker children attending the nearby school. I couldn’t understand why or how we could just let useful land, bricks, glass, metal, soil, go to waste.

This is when I really started to become fascinated with renewing space. I wanted to commit the revolutionary crime of restarting.