This series by photographer Justin Kimball (born 1961) features small towns in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio brought to the brink of obsolescence by the recent financial downturn, capturing their streets, residents and landscapes in photographs both sensitive to their subjects and compositionally striking.

While imbued with social and political subtext, Kimball’s images--of ramshackle buildings against a landscape, a mother and baby on their front porch, roadside church signs and teenagers playing a game of pickup basketball--carry a broader significance. In his depiction of communities faced by hardship, Kimball examines the persistence of hope and the concept of what it means to be human in our modern world. His photographs document a growing--yet often overlooked--portion of the American landscape, providing an impressive portrait of the present day.