With the exception of a few antique interiors, these are city images: stone and iron bridges, railroad yards, grain elevators, warehouses, factories, abandoned relics ready for the wrecking ball. They are taken mostly in half-light and bad weather, those early hours when the feeble winter sun of Minnesota can hardly squeeze its way up into the heavy overcast sky. The strongest light floods into the oversized windows of deserted buildings, ghosts of light come into empty bare rooms. The businesses in these pictures (taken mostly in the 1990s) are ghosts, too, from the 1920s and 1930s—a shoe repair shop,...