Robert C Osborne is a photographer based in Racine, Wisconsin.

For more photos, follow him on Instagram.

Forty+ years ago, I spent a substantial amount of my free time with the practice of photography. After learning the basics using a darkroom at my high school, I set up my own darkroom in my parents’ basement and worked to produce images (with a Canon A-1) that I liked both formally and technically. My darkroom experiments ended when I left for college.

In the intervening years, photography became a tool for documenting my life and my wife’s artwork. That changed when Covid arrived. The pandemic largely confined me to Racine, including working from home. To get out of the house, I started taking long walks that turned into photographic wanderings. As the world slowly reopened, these wanderings have taken me further afield. Social media has provided an easy way to display the work and connect with an audience.

I focus primarily on our built environment in the tradition of the New Topographics movement, providing objective documentation of my surroundings while striving to reveal aesthetic elements within the human-altered landscape. I look for buildings and details that exemplify a region’s industrial heritage and have pops of color or unexpected shapes and juxtapositions. Classic composition can combine with serendipitous elements to provide a fresh take on these archetypal environments.

I typically use either a Nikon D750 or a compact Fujifilm X100V for easy carrying on walks. I also use a cell phone when that’s all I have available—currently a Samsung Galaxy.