After the 1978 exhibition BASHO, an exhibition of reductive black and white prints, the artist embarked on using color film and printing color photographs in his studio darkroom for the first time. Using Kodacolor 400 and a wide-angle lens, he used the photographs of Stephen Shore and the color pioneer William Eggleston as approaches to understand the medium. Neither Shore or Eggleston photographed California as a primary subject. Even as a native Californian, he understood that there was a plastic quality about the sub-urban environs of the “Inland Empire,” marked by an area from east Los Angeles County through to east Riverside county, a changed-ness that guaranteed that this environment of cars, buildings and their attendant human touch would mutate and become unrecognizable in only a few years. This primary assumption has come true. Not one place he have photographed within this series retains its original form or color.