Knives is an elegy for American manufacturing made over several years, using photography to trace the shifting relationships between masculinity, myth and violence in a rural town whose economic base, eviscerated by globalisation, is now supported by the prison industrial complex. The cutlery industry formed the economic backbone of New York's Hudson Valley for over a century and a half, until the Schrade knife factory abruptly closed in the early aughts, leaving seven hundred men and women out of work. The town's maximum-security prison, Eastern Correctional Facility, became the largest employer in the area, shielded from the wider community by layers of secrecy. As businesses continued to close during the decade that followed, drug abuse, mental disorders and rare cancers have become more widespread. The project operates as two intertwined stories: one, a typological study of knives crafted in the region since the rise of the cutlery industry; the other, a closer document of the town that produced them. Together they form an elegy for the dignity of work, the loss of meaning, and the contested place where American masculinity meets American decline.