Spaced along the California coast a stiff day’s march apart, stand twenty-one mission churches, simple and massive structures of adobe and stone. Some of these mellowed cloisters are smothered in the metropolitan embrace, enclosed on all sides by the structures of a newer day. Others stand free in open valleys, still retaining some measure of the pastoral charm that was their original setting. Nearly all of them are merely token survivals of once-widespreading structures that were miniature cities in themselves teeming with activity. Like shells found on the beach, the missions that stand in varying degrees of restoration seem washed up on the shores of time, the life within long since departed.
My Mission Statement explores seven of these Missions along the El Camino Real.

images are black and white film photographs sepia toned fiber prints handpainted with oils