Slowly, methodically, and with a finality that is difficult to witness, the historic village in the Rhenish brown coal mining district is being consumed, building by building, by the advancing Hambach open-cast mine. Over the course of several years, I have returned again and again to Manheim-Alt, to document this quiet erasure: the demolition of homes, the emptying of streets once filled with ordinary life, the gradual silencing of a place that once simply existed.

There is something profoundly magnetic about Manheim, a pull I cannot fully explain, perhaps the strange gravity that absence exerts, the way a disappearing place demands to be seen before it is gone entirely. Each visit offers less to photograph and yet feels no less urgent. Through it all, the desecrated village church at the heart of Manheim has remained, a stubborn, hollow constant amid the surrounding dissolution, standing as both witness and ruin. These photographs are my attempt to hold on to what is already leaving.