You can see something for 28 years and not truly see it. I am always looking—always searching for fleeting moments and beautiful light, but don’t always see and appreciate what is right in front of me.
I was born in Columbia, South Carolina and spent 18 years there before moving to Georgia. I grew up unimpressed with the Southeastern United States. My mother was a military brat with years of travel under her belt and no deep roots or ties to anywhere. I wanted to see rainforests and mountains and coral reefs.
My father’s parents lived and worked on a bicentennial cotton and peanut farm in rural Georgia. My siblings and I would go there every Thanksgiving and pile into my grandfather’s pick-up truck, which was full of a litter of Dalmatian puppies, my cousins, and remnants from a recent harvest. We’d wind around the dirt roads of the farm, under giant tree branches, past ponds my grandfather had dug and I still wasn’t impressed or happy to call the South my home—even on the land my own family had tilled, wept into, and been buried in for the past 200 years.
I started photographing the South for “Facing South” in a very directed, deliberate, yet personal way when I was at my last staff newspaper job in 2008. Then, I was intent on photographing southern stereotypes. I was still ashamed of the place I called home because of its past of poverty and inequality and I was coming to terms with that through my photography. I went with my camera to places that made me uncomfortable—like a hate-filled Ku Klux Klan rally in front of the Gilmer County, Georgia courthouse–to try and understand this region and its history better. I wanted to understand the deep pride so many people carry in the Deep South because I felt like an outsider.
Photography has always been a gift and a tool to me in that way—it has opened doors of understanding for me and it has opened people up to me, people that I would have never met without a camera to my eye.
Shortly after the project was conceived, we founded LUCEO Images and I was shown a deep appreciation for a less literal way of seeing the world and photographing it by my colleagues who push and inspire me. LUCEO members are expected to shoot personal work—it’s what the cooperative was formed to honor and create.
Since I started working on “Facing South,” I’ve photographed an active volcano in Guatemala, a wind farm in the San Gorgonio Pass in California, a 500-year-old castle in Ireland, a reef in Grand Cayman, a wheat field in rural Kansas.
Yet, just last week, I was at the beach with family on the South Carolina coast and driving back to the house alone one morning. I drove over bridges and over the marsh and it struck me all at once–this is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It took me 28 years to realize and three years of deliberate shooting to truly see the Deep South as a place of exquisite beauty.
This ongoing personal photography exploration opened my eyes and changed me. So far I’ve photographed things I’ve grown to love, which are some of the very same things that I used to walk past without acknowledgement: the Spanish moss hanging from 400-year-old oaks, the crickets humming all night, the humidity so thick it falls across your skin like a wool blanket, a 98-year-old woman with a pack of donkeys who cusses like a sailor in her southern twang.
With time, and with the loss of both my grandparents in the past two years, and with this visual exploration of the region for this personal photo essay, I’m starting to see this place—the Deep South—as a place I’ve inherited, a place that is one of the most beautiful in the world, a place rich with deep history, deep pride and deeper shame, a place I’ve seen for my entire life but never understood.
