'This was the first one I took. There were people going in and out of this store all day long. Three years later it was torn down' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'This trailer looked so happy, like it was smiling – there were kids playing in front of it and it was full of life. I went again later and it was abandoned' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'This feels like a sad picture to me – there's such a contrast between the house, which looks like it's dying, and the incredibly healthy bougainvillea' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'This was just an abandoned store. It was in a really small, deserted town called Thermal, which had nothing going on there' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'This was next to a lake. Everyone thought it was going to be a great resort, but it became very polluted and all these fancy motels fell apart' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'The desert is a very independent place. There's no laws, really, you can just do anything you want. There are some very strange characters living out there – some of them very friendly, some not very friendly' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'Some of these buildings were actually in small towns and had buildings right next to them. Others were out in the middle of nowhere, and they really were very lonely old buildings' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'I think these buildings are beautiful. They're funny and ironic and sad at the same time, because they're really dying' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'I wanted to pay homage to the buildings, so I'm singling them out and making them special' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'These pictures are somewhere between photographs and paintings. They're real photographs of real buildings, but the environments have changed' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'I'd clean up the picture and clean up the background and put the right sky in, to complement the buildings. The mountain range in the background is always the same' Photograph: Ed Freeman
'I treated the buildings like an architectural model, so people could appreciate them instead of just being part of a landscape' Photograph: Ed Freeman
