Photo Essay
“The ruins remain overgrown with castor plants, which can be, alternately, an excellent source of sustenance if cooked properly or a natural source of cyanide.” The traditional Bahamian response to the request for someone’s name, upon introduction, is typically their name preceded by “I name.” Such a title seemed fitting for this project after I »
Memoir
1. Abiding Metaphors When I was three years old, I nearly drowned in a hotel pool in Mexico. My earliest memory is of what seemed a long moment, as if I were suspended there, looking up through a ceiling of water, the high sun barely visible overhead. I do not recall being afraid as I »
Essay
“The documentary artist attempts, however imperfectly, to do something about what they witness, how they feel, what they are compelled to say.” For many years I’ve forbidden students in my photography courses from coming to class and talking about an image they saw but didn’t take. In a class built around the making of pictures, »
Photo Essay
In the late 1890s, self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum (1877–1922) began riding the rails as an itinerant portraitist, traveling primarily in North Carolina and Virginia. Mangum worked during the rise of the segregationist laws of the Jim Crow era. Despite this, his portraits reveal a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse, and show lives »
Photo Essay
In the short story “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” Barry Hannah describes a gay Confederate soldier’s infatuation with Jeb Stuart, under whom he serves. It’s a hopeless and doomed predicament. To my mind, it’s a kind of peculiar faith in an unachievable outcome—much like the faith in political solutions to the »
Photo Essay
Join us (rain, Hurricane Dorian, or shine) TONIGHT, Thursday, September 5 at 5:30 PM, for the opening reception of “New Orleans Second Line Parades,” on view through December 2019 at the Center for the Study of the American South. On roughly forty Sundays a year, the hardworking members of New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure »
Photo Essay
“These landscapes hold the remnants of five thousand distant voices.” If all photographs are abandonings, as the American critic Henry Allen once wrote, then how might we view photographs of lynching sites? Located for the most part in the geographic margins and the shadows of our collective memory, these landscapes hold the remnants of five »
Photo Essay
Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For more than five years, we traveled throughout the United States creating To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, which culminated in a fine art exhibition and book »
Photo Essay
Most photographs are born in a fraction of a second. They show a small piece of the visible world as seen from a particular vantage point at a particular moment in time. They reflect an instantaneous present sandwiched between a fixed past and an unknown future. Photographs draw from a world that already exists; they »
Photo Essay
This series of over-sized tintypes is a rumination upon a relationship with a person and a city. Using metaphor, allegory, and the re-interpretation of a few facts, these images re-stage events and themes, and recreate certain atmospheres from a period of sixteen years. They are an idealized record of my relationship with my partner Brian »
Photo Essay
It may seem impossible, given climate change and ISIS, mass shootings and growing inequality and disregard for Black life, sexual assault and Russian hacking and the opioid epidemic, to worry about any other single thing, but history too is in trouble. I do not mean history as content. Beloved television shows and films take place »
Photo Essay
The following images were submitted by student photographers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in response to a call for photographs that depict the pursuit of social equality, the challenging of injustices, the strengthening of community, or the advancement of human rights. A collaboration with the Campus Y, the call coincides with »