Taken in the small Northern Delaware River communities— some of the oldest in the United States— the images in New York City-based photographer Tyler Roste’s series “Men of Men” offer a bleak and yet also poetic picture of the impacts of economic and industrial change on small town, rural America.

In Roste’s words: “‘Men of Men’ is about man’s corrosive connection to the past; how we are tied to the history of the land and intertwined with it; how we continue to struggle in the same lands, on the same ground as those who came before us. We come up from the mud of the land and drag the sins of the past out with us. . . There is a richness to the culture that presides here, a trueness to them, something deeply rooted in the souls of the past. A thread tied to the ghost of an older America.”

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