Nat Ward, left, was photographed in June 2000 by Jon Lowenstein as part of the CITY 2000 photodocumentary project. I interviewed him the following February in his loft apartment, which he shared with a roommate and a vast assortment of interesting objects, including three motorcycles and two partially disassembled pianos.
When I got there I knew I wanted to go study abroad, someplace where they had a language I didn’t know. I kind of knew French, and I vaguely knew Spanish–high school Spanish–so I decided to go to Italy. In retrospect I wish I’d gone someplace where they speak Spanish, ’cause now I live in a Mexican-American neighborhood and I speak Italian. But I went to Italy and just loved it. I lived in Florence, and that’s where I got into historic preservation, which is what one of my master’s degrees is in. Before I went I started taking art history courses and studying Renaissance thought and culture. And while I was there I realized that there’s a culture where they take for granted that they’re going to have these heinously old things around them, and they take for granted that you’re never going to knock down a building. They would never ever in a million years think, “Oh, the property this building’s on is worth more than the building, I should tear it down and put up six condos for yuppies.” They would never think of that.
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Every spring and fall Kenneth throws a pig roast, which brings a lot of other people in, and we get really drunk and cook pigs and burn things. There’s usually a band, and then one of the stupider things we do is belt-sander races. Belt sanders are like tanks; the belt acts like a tread, and they go really fast. In this picture I’m looking down the belt-sander track and wagering money. The reason I love this picture is that it makes me look like an incredible redneck, which I find really funny, and it could be the 1971 Indiana State Fair and I’m betting on a tractor race or something.
