For me, my photographs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum were the first significant images I created using digital technology. When I first began working digitally, my work was quite transitional. I was reworking many old ideas and images. What I needed was a project to take advantage of my growing skills. With these thoughts in mind, fate seemed to intervene.

The landlord closed the building then because he was weary of meeting New York City's code for apartments, which had swung greatly in favor of tenants as time passed. Only a ground floor commercial space remained open; the top five floors were sealed. They were only reopened in 1993, revealing 60 years of water damage, humidity swelling and dryness contraction.

The walls and ceilings had peeled, collapsed and transformed themselves into abstract expressionist reliefs and sculptures. I was asked to help document the state of the rooms before they were restored for the museum. In doing so, I was inspired by the strong sense of the spirits I felt still there. As I walked alone among the rooms lit only by a single incandescent bulb, I could not help but feel the presence of generations of individuals and families who occupied these spaces. This inspired me to use the images as backgrounds to combine with my collection of 19th century portraits of men, women and children. The resulting series forms the Lower East Side Tenement project, a body of work that gave my digital desires some content. I continued to output these collages as Polacolor Image Transfers and to rework them with pastel and dry pigment. This series to me was as much a breakthrough as my Androgyn series was five years earlier. In that series, I finally achieved the proper balance between technique and aesthetic content. These transfers combined Renaissance imagery with a distressed technique from Image
Transfer that resembled ancient frescos.