YOUNGSTOWN, OH — During two consecutive days dimmed by Canadian wildfire smoke, the haze transformed daylight into something resembling night, evoking the choking smog that once hung over the Mahoning Valley when steel mills dominated the region. In Youngstown, it is nearly impossible to separate the landscape from its industrial character. Industry is not merely part of the city’s history, it remains embedded in its architecture, infrastructure, atmosphere, and collective memory. CONSECRATED examines this uneasy convergence of religion, industry, memory, and decline.

The series focuses primarily on Orthodox and Eastern Christian churches established by immigrant communities who arrived to work in the region’s factories, foundries, and mills. These churches were more than places of worship. They served as anchors of language, ritual, identity, and mutual support, preserving a sense of homeland within neighborhoods shaped by exhausting labor and industrial expansion.

Their onion cupola domes, crosses, and modest sanctuaries remain embedded among utility poles, electrical wires, vacant lots, aging houses, asphalt, and remnants of industrial infrastructure. Rather than treating these elements as visual intrusions, Lippowiths binds the sacred to the material world in this work. Power lines resemble webs, arteries, borders, or restraints. Crosses rise through smoke but do not fully escape it. Statues and steeples compete with transformers, streetlights, and commercial structures for authority over the skyline.

Here, even the sacred is visible through the industrial landscape. The mills may have closed, but their physical and psychological presence continues to shape how this city is seen and understood. Church and the notion of religion appear at once enduring and vulnerable. Some remain active; others seem isolated, diminished, repurposed, or fully liquidated. Once central to dense ethnic neighborhoods, they now stand within communities altered by population loss, economic collapse, and the erosion of shared public life.

CONSECRATED reveals what a community continues to hold sacred after the industries that sustained it disappear. It considers faith as refuge, inheritance, architecture, labor, and memory, while also confronting spiritual estrangement, declining congregations, loss of community, and a broader sense of godlessness. What remains is neither entirely holy nor fully abandoned, but suspended between devotion and loss.  God is still present beneath the wires, within the haze, inseparable from the landscape that formed it.