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Personal Work Statement As a photographer I focus on issues of cultural identity and memory, and construct contemporary narratives which create an opportunity for discourse in which individual and collective memory can cultivate new explorations of identity and place. A seminal aspect of my work lies in the territory of family. Home and family have functioned as subject, provided a physical source archive, and served as a catalyst or touchstone for all of my work. Through the lens of family, I have explored portraiture, war and its ramifications, and numerous forgotten and soon-to-be-forgotten histories and cultures of the south. The portraits of Point of Origin mark the beginning of my forays into the complex nature of memory, home, place, and identity within the southern vernacular. In 1995 I left the south and moved to New York City. I started a record label, played in bands, and eventually went back to art school. In 2004, after living in New York and DC, I visited home again. Experiencing the south with new eyes, I saw my small hometown, early experiences, and family upbringing in ways I had never seen them before. My perceptions about myself and my childhood, colored with new experiences and information, became simultaneously darker, more raw, and increasingly beautiful. Point of Origin is a subjective and personal re-enactment of my childhood in Statesville, North Carolina. The stage is the rural south. The actors (when possible) are my actual family members and close family friends whose remembrances are the seeds for these photographs. These portraits are specific to my experiences and I consider them self-portraits disguised as environmental documentation. Certain characters are portrayed multiple times to represent the various steps of transformation and awareness children go through as the adults around them lose their perceived perfection. This body of work is an ongoing and evolving project documenting the shifting perceptions that reshape our recollections of the past. As time has passed, this on going body of work has unfolded in chapters. The first chapter is The Creekhouse Log, which recreates early childhood experiences. The second chapter, The Habits of Being, are portraits of adults from my childhood and adolescent perspectives. My next body of work Precipice began in 2001 and evolved to its final form in 2013. It is a departure from the traditional black and white prints of Point of Origin. In this work I employ the use of appropriation and objects. Precipice is an installation comprised of source material from two eras of war. Although these images are certainly born of conflict and controversy, the installation is more about moments of anticipation--those moments of knowing that exist before events take place that will shape our life path forever, and the irrevocable decisions that result. The first elements of the installation are the inkjet prints derived from Polaroids taken by my father on his first flight into Vietnam as a reservist surgeon. These show very little evidence of war itself, but the trepidation transferred from photographer to film is undeniable. The second element is a display of latent imagery housed in thirty one rolls of undeveloped 120 film I shot of the television during the events of the day September 11, 2001. To me these rolls of film represent choice, possibility, the aura of a pivotal force which is never verbalized and more powerful unseen.
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My current in-process personal work includes a documentary and book of portraiture entitled Full Cry. This film is an important document of the demise of elements of rural North Carolina culture due to suburban encroachment. I spent a summer with the “hilltoppers,” a group of local men, mainly farmers, who hunt fox on foot and spend their nights moving from hilltop to hilltop listening for their packs of hounds. The hilltoppers are no-kill hunters whose joy is the symphonic sound of the foxhounds’ voice as the dogs pursue their quarry. Fox hunting is becoming obsolete mainly due to highway and neighborhood construction, causing irrevocable changes in attitudes of land ownership. Forty years ago the farmers could run their hounds free of worry, as farms in the area bordered each other and stretched for thousands of uninterrupted acres. There were few roads and little traffic. Everyone knew their neighbors, and fox hunting was a way of life. The cry of the hounds was welcome music on a Saturday night. Today, transplanted suburban families have no understanding of these men and their sport. The hunting foxhounds are endangered by cars, and these hunters who once had free reign of a vast expanse of acres must limit their hunting to pens of a few hundred. I am in the first year of this projected three-year project, involving color 4x5 night portraits of the last of the hilltoppers in the woods and on the hilltops of my family farm. My family has fox hunted for generations and the farm is one of the only fox preserves left in the Carolinas. I look forward to exploring the different practices and oral histories connected with fox hunters from as far away as Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia, who come to my father’s farm to hunt. These portraits will be published in a book which will contain a CD of the documentary Full Cry. In tandem with Full Cry, I am photographing The Rain Crow. The Rain Crow is the story of my father, a beloved country surgeon, recently retired, and his connections to his patients, the south, our family farm and its inhabitants. My father is a brilliant doctor and a renegade. He designed his own surgical tools or repurposed construction tools when a proper instrument for surgery was not available. He went to his patients’ homes to treat them and was a part of their life. People would travel from two counties away for him to be their doctor, and would gladly wait for an appointment until 3am. When patients couldn’t pay they paid him in trade, and often in pies. I remember there were always at least ten pies in his office at all times. The title The Rain Crow is derived from southern folklore. The rain crow is a solitary bird that hides in the woods, predicting death and rain each with different calls. My father is always listening for the rain crow when his garden needs watering in the summer. After decades of setting store by the call of this elusive bird, he believes the rain crows are dying out due to the use of herbicides and pesticides on farmlands. Most people fail to notice or even care about their diminishing numbers because rain crows are not a valuable game bird. My father says “The rain crow is left over from a different time. They are from an era when people told time by the angle of the sun and hollered from hilltop to hilltop to borrow a plow. They don’t belong in this time and neither do I.” He retired at age 77 in part because he was no longer allowed to accept pies for payment. He practiced medicine and lives his life in a different way still deeply connected to nature and appalachian culture complying to an observance all his own on land that he is determined to conserve. The Rain Crow strives to preserve the dignity and simplicity of this way of life.