When I walk deep into Brooklyn's Prospect Park on the first snowfall each year, I find myself transported to the winter meadows and hills of my childhood and to the hikes and backpacking trips around the tiny Pennsylvania factory town where I grew up. My town was surrounded by Christmas tree farms, apple orchards, corn fields and forested hills. My stomping grounds were the trail down to Kettle Creek Bottom, the railroad bridge across the Susquehanna River, and the walk through hemlocks and pines to the swimming hole known as The Haystacks. The steeper streets were closed when it snowed, and we immediately claimed them for sledding.

At first glance, many of the snowy spaces in The Urban Wilderness might be mistaken for those rural scenes: stark white meadows rimmed by low hills and bare trees. But upon closer inspection, street lamps come into focus, hints of park benches appear and backpackers are revealed to be dog walkers. The wilderness and the urban details are an incongruous mix: the juxtaposition of pristine emptiness with hints of the immense human presence lurking just outside the frame. But a hike through Prospect Park in the winter is the closest thing I can manage these days to those walks through the snowy hills of my childhood.

In December 2012, New York's Museum of Modern Art invited visitors to step in front of Philip Worthington's "Shadow Monsters" installation, a white screen that projected their silhouettes onto the Moma Atrium walls, turning them into crazy monsters and animals.

Though the projections were totally entrancing, I found myself turning around to watch the visitors instead, as they twisted and contorted their bodies and faces before dozens of watching museum-goers, a study in body language, dance, theater, and self-consciousness.

Ever since I first starting going to the movies, I’ve been intrigued by the tiny windowed room above the audience. I imagined a projectionist threading film into a complicated maze of wheels and sprockets, or splicing trailers under the dim light of an editing table, or maybe even staring back at me from the shadowy recesses.

I knew that someday I’d set aside the time to explore and shoot projection booths. But in 2011 the mission became urgent when I discovered that theaters were under pressure to replace

film projection with digital. The quaint booths familiar from

films like Sherlock Junior and Cinema Paradiso were being replaced with a laptop connected to a box with a lens.

And so for the past couple of years I've carried my camera into those rooms, capturing the strange beauty of the machines and tools and faces of the last remaining film projection booths.

Over the past few years I've photographed dozens of aging and dying small industries around New York City -- repair shops, scrap-metal shops, machine shops -- returning repeatedly to get to know the owners and workers and to document these unseen spaces and lives. For this series, I photographed some of the last workers and machines of their kind in a machine shop called "Custom Machinery," which is gradually being closed down, the machines sold off, as the owner ages and the demand for his work dries up.

Though there will always be certain kinds of work that become obsolete, I believe it's important to stop and think about what we destroy in the name of progress, to make informed decisions about the price we pay.

Matthew Crawford, in "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work," describes leaving behind a series of stultifying academic jobs and turning to a career as a motorcycle mechanic, where he discovers the "intensely absorbing nature" of manual labor. He appreciates "losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it." As society devalues such manual trades, Crawford argues, we risk losing a bit of our soul.

It's that bit of soul I tried to capture in Custom Machinery. In this age of cubicles and knowledge workers and information technology, I want these images to remind us of the beauty of machines and tools and the hands that use them.