True Grit

I have been attempting to document people with very different social and economic backgrounds so that I can present them side by side and David, was a very special person in that series. A highly intelligent self-made engineer from hard-scrabble roots who had built and lost a successful corporation, he had seen remarkable highs in his life, as well as nearly unimaginably abyssal lows. Having lost his well situated home near L.A. years ago he now lives in the desert and works for hours each day in a workshop with no AC where temperatures routinely soar into the triple-digits. He describes himself as relic, a maker whose artisan craft is vanishing in a time where international companies routinely violate domestic patents to mass produce affordable, low-quality, disposable knock-offs of the devices he once employed dozens of people to build. His resilience, his achievements, the hardships he has faced, the fact that he was, underneath a tough veneer a very compassionate man, and a haunting sadness in his eyes make him remarkably unique individual.