NEW YORK, NY.- Portsmouth, Ohio, located at the union of the Scioto and Ohio rivers at the edge of America's Rust Belt, was once a booming industrial center celebrated for its production of shoes and bricks. In the 1990s, when the global forces of deindustrialization shut down factories throughout the region, the population of Portsmouth plummeted and today the city is best known for its thriving trade in opioid pain medications and an epidemic of prescription drug addiction.

For the last 26 years, Ken D. Ashton, a Washington, D.C. based photographer whose work focuses on America's changing urban landscape, has participated in a bike tour every Mother's Day weekend from Columbus to Portsmouth and back. In 2009, he started photographing the neighborhoods of Portsmouth during those weekends to investigate the social and financial impact of deindustrialization on America through the acute scope of this city on the other side of Appalachia. Photographing Portsmouth with his camera during bike tour Saturdays became a ritual that continued through 2016. The photographs are gathered together in Portsmouth: Collected Saturdays published by Daylight Books, May 16, 2017.

Through his watchful and restrained lens, Ashton captures a city that has transformed over time into a desolate, hollowed out ghost town. Images of boarded-up buildings, emptied parking lots, broken sidewalks, asphalt patches, discarded clothing and furniture, and tired lettering on business signs evoke abandonment and a society that appears to be frozen in time. Collectively, the work reveals the devastating effects of industrial decline on a community and how the influence of urban landscape affects our emotions, actions and imaginations.

In his foreword in the book, Paul Roth, Director, Ryerson Image Centre, writes that Ashton's photographs have "established a potent vision of urban degeneration, of communities in a state of inexorable regression -- despite the will and best efforts of their inhabitants. The quiet struggle against entropy is evident in the buildings, signs, vehicles, doorways and windows, backyards and alleys he records."

Complex History of Portsmouth
In his essay in the book, Kriston Capps, a staff writer for The Atlantic's CityLab, traces Portsmouth's history in the 19th century as one of the central crossings of the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves used this route to cross the Ohio River, known as the "River Jordan," and continue north to Detroit and into Canada to gain freedom.

Capps also addresses the impact on Portsmouth of the infamous practice of redlining that started in the 1930s. Neighborhoods outlined in red were given "D" grades and considered to be credit risks. Seven neighborhoods in Portsmouth were given "D's", including those with black populations as well as others destroyed by the great flood of the Ohio River in 1937. Districts with black families were considered just as undesirable and credit-risky as neighborhoods leveled by a historic natural disaster.

"The concentration of poverty along racial lines -- and the decades of missed opportunities that flowed from legal segregation -- undermined Portsmouth. Segregation undermined the United States", writes Capps.

Ken D. Ashton resides in Washington, D.C., and has spent the past 25 photographing urban neighborhoods that are experiencing transition as well as communities that have remained intact, with D.C. as a center point. His largest project was an encyclopedic undertaking photographing communities in the Northeastern corridor of the U.S., from D.C. to Boston, entitled Megalopolis. Ashton's work has been featured in exhibitions in many venues, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington Project for the Arts, North Carolina Museum of Art, and Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany.

Paul Roth is Director of the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Previously, he served as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Roth has helped realize numerous exhibitions and film series, including Scotiabank Photography Award 2014: Mark Ruwedel (2015), Edward Burtynsky: Oil (2009), Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (2008), Sally Mann: What Remains (2004), and I...Dreaming: The Visionary Cinema of Stan Brakhage (National Gallery of Art, 2002). He is author and co-editor of Gordon Parks: Collected Works (Steidl, 2012).

Kriston Capps is a critic and reporter. He is a staff writer for CityLab, the urbanism site for The Atlantic, where he writes about housing, architecture, urban design, and other topics. He is a former senior editor for Architect magazine. His writing about art and architecture has been published by Artforum, New York, The Washington Post, Slate, Art in America, among other publications. Capps is also a contributing editor for the Washington City Paper and writes weekly art reviews and art news for the paper. Capps was the winner of the inaugural 2016 Sarah Booth Conroy Prize for Architectural Journalism and Criticism. He has given talks at the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. As an adjunct, he has taught seminars at George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Maryland Institute College of Art.