Art
Diego Camposeco’s Utopian Vision “The quinceañera is smiling, framed in the center, a standard sort of portrait for the occasion, but she is pointedly out-of-context.” “There is a South in every North,”I wrote Diego Camposeco, whose brilliant career as an artist and filmmaker was cut short by his death in 2019. His art and writing »
Photo Essay
“In a purposeful inversion of the news headlines from the time, my work foregrounds individuals who fought for civil rights and who were victims of retaliatory violence.” It was a sweltering summer in 2002 and I was wandering downtown Montgomery, exploring and making photographs, when I found myself at a historical marker in front of »
Photo Essay
“The following portraits show a few of the new faces of tradition in North Carolina, revealing the range of who they are, what they do, and how they commit to their artistic practice.” Since 1977, the Folklife Program of the North Carolina Arts Council has identified and documented traditional artists and their communities in order »
Snapshot
“As blood filled the syringe and tears began to fall down her cheeks, Willow’s mood shifted from excitement to determination, frustration to embarrassment.” Between 2015 and 2017, I partnered with University of Alabama at Birmingham sociology professor Heith Copes to create an ethnography of methamphetamine use in rural Northeast Alabama. Together, we interviewed and photographed »
Snapshot
“It’s another muggy southern summer and the landscape is overgrown with signs and symbols following in its oxygen. How much hill can a person bear?” The thing about moments for me is that they’re never about one thing. Frustratingly, photography carries a singular moment in time but must bear the weight, too—of context, truth, and »
Film
“I have skin in the game. I live here. Appalachians hold me accountable at the grocery store, and that makes the work, and me, more honest.” The week of March 13, 2017, was like any other week for me. I was hustling to get access to a tense courtroom for my feature documentary Recovery Boys »
Photo Essay
“We were not so much learning how to photograph as how to see.” I often describe my undergraduate photography training at Yale University as a photo boot camp. On the first day of class, we were told to acquire a 35 mm camera—ideally one that did not require a battery—with a 50 mm lens. Zoom »
Snapshot
“From where I stood, I saw the spirit their bodies had conjured: that was the moment I wanted.” We were in a crowded church. I couldn’t see much until I let the crying, stomping, and chanting guide me. As the believers rocked side to side, their skirts and robes blended with the powerful sounds filling »
Snapshot
“And just as I was starting to get frustrated that a picture wasn’t to be found here, I spotted Emanuel and his son Yeddeh in the shaded opening of their garage, engaged in a most intimate and trusting family ritual.” This little neighborhood in Baytown, Texas, sandwiched between I-10 and the Lynch-burg Canal on the »
Snapshot
“We watch the evidence of a hard day’s labor evaporate into the deepening night sky.” We are banging down the highway in the rental car, Derek and I, leaving Arkansas, heading to New Orleans, but we’ve left time to wander in Mississippi. No real place to go, but looking for nothing in particular, follow your »
Snapshot
“All you can see is a moment when the late afternoon light shone down on some old stone and prairie grass. A frame made from a town’s future in the past.” The photographic form can really only tell us one thing: what was there, once. This photograph was taken on a muggy June day in »
Photo Essay
“There’s an unsettledness that attracted me to these spaces, that maybe draws in people of a wandering sort, but it doesn’t allow for getting too attached.” From 2005 to 2007, I used a Rolleicord twin lens reflex to photograph RV parks across North Carolina, making color landscapes and portraits to document a vanishing world. I »