It Can Be This Way Always

It Can Be This Way Always Project Statement Since 2007, I have been photographically documenting the Kerrville Folk Festival in central Texas, an annual 18-day event that has been in existence since 1972. This body of work captures the festivalgoers, the surrounding Texas Hill Country and Quiet Valley Ranch (host site of the festival), and it’s transitory yet longstanding community. This documentary project observes the American traveling troubadour and the unique camaraderie and society that develop when such individuals come together. Many of the large format images of individuals and their spaces depict a subversion of the conformity and complications of our modern-day existence and the simultaneous entering into another world that possesses its own unspoken codes of conduct and hierarchy. Most of my creative work considers how the urban environment and its physical architecture influence a community’s organization. My work demonstrates ways in which a space can affect personality and how individuals impact a space. This ongoing folk festival series It Can Be This Way, Always continues my conceptual interests within a very different environment. This environment lacks physical infrastructure and permanence, allowing an examination of the individual and communal identity in a perpetually fluctuating space.