Snapshot
Elliston, Virginia Musician Laney Sullivan has been a powerful, persistent advocate for environmental accountability and efforts to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and recently cancelled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Her band Holy River has played countless fundraisers and its members have been leaders in connecting artists with impacted communities along both routes.
Snapshot
Black Mountain, North Carolina As I walked up the hill with my camera, the Quiet House slowly came into view. I didn’t recognize it at first. I had memorized the photographs that Hazel Larsen Archer and Robert Rauschenberg made of the stone sanctuary and imagined a scene closer to their vision. But over seventy years »
Photo Essay
“Thanks for Looking” is a collection of (mostly) unpublished photographs I made just off to the side of what was supposed to be the main attraction. As a daily news stringer and freelance commercial photographer, I’m lucky to provide a livelihood for my family with my camera, but I’m also at the mercy of the »
Photo Essay
Driving south on I-85 from Richmond into North Carolina, the trees begin to envelop you. Not being from here, I am seduced by that wilderness. It’s like entering an open storybook, a deep trove of mythologies and histories built into the landscape and etched into memory from the stories of others, both recent and generations »
Photo Essay
“I found myself wanting to find a way to bridge the gap between the Black and white experiences of living in Claiborne County, and I hoped that the photos I took might someday help others see how they might flourish, as my girls did, from immersive contact with a culture not their own.” In 1973, »
Photo Essay
“My dad spent much of his childhood in this North Mississippi landscape, and the process of wandering alone through these woods gave me a sense of connection to him that I hadn’t expected.” Early this Spring, at the beginning of quarantine, my wife and I had the privilege of living at my grandmother’s lake house, »
Photo Essay
The land, creeks, and rivers of Orange and Alamance Counties in North Carolina have been the core of my photographic work for the last decade. With creeping subdivisions snipping away at farmland and open fields year by year, I feel this work of photographing them has taken on a documentary element I did not intend. »
Music
On a sticky June Sunday in 1959, two people meet each other outside an eastern Kentucky hamlet called Daisy. A twenty-seven-year-old college grad living in New York City, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, wants to experience the Great Depression, and he is listening for music that might work like time travel. The other man, »
Photo Essay
“The boundaries of traditional documentary tend to encourage a certain rigid empathy. When I was learning, it seemed like an emotional calculus I would never master.” While writing this from an isolation spurred by a novel corona-virus pandemic, I’m stressed for a million reasons. One is that I’m at my home in Mississippi when I »
Memoir
I. I have carried a photograph on my person for the past year now. Like my debit card, lip balm, or driver’s license, this photograph has become part of my daily essentials kit. In the black-and-white image, two women clad in patterned and madras print dresses and low kitten heels sit on a rock and »
Art
“By gilding her passport, Page renders its emblematic privileges into an explicit ‘golden ticket.’” Artist Susan Harbage Page uses her US passport (collaged here) to explore her relationship to citizenship, mobility, and access. This self-reflexive art piece figures gold leaf as a signifier of treasured possession and links notions of worth and wealth with inclusion in »
Art
“What does it mean to be (categorically) ‘undesirable’?” When I first saw Tommy Kha’s “Return to Sender” series, I couldn’t help but think of an article I’d read some years ago about online dating apps in the United States. The article revealed how self-identified Asian men and women occupied opposite ends of a desirability spectrum, »