I moved back to the South after living in California for most of my adult life. I find myself drawn to places or things that are familiar to me from having grown up here.
I identify with the South, especially after being away for so long. I am excited by my surroundings - I live in the country and I see great colors and displays of creativity in hand lettered signs and arrangements of things for sale on the side of the road or in someone’s yard. Often aspects of daily life can be beautiful, or funny, but also a little sad. I like to find these little moments of beauty, ways that people have been creative maybe without meaning to be, and sights of great bold colors. I find photography to have a bit of magic to it, and with my camera I enjoy working with color within the southern rural and small town landscape.
The following excerpt from Matt McCann's New York Times LENS blog feature about my work offers insight in to my project;
"She returned to Georgia and, her perspective sharpened by time away, photographed the people, items and texture of the place she wanted to preserve. Junked American cars, hand-painted signs, the grocery store her grandparents took her to were unchanged after decades. That nostalgic pull lends her work and out-of-time quality, so that contemporary flash points - the occasional Confederate flag, for instance - are rare, but the do crop up.
Her work, she insists, isn't intended to be political. 'But it is something that has a presence - certainly a visual presence,' she said.
Largely, however, her personal work connects because she has connected with its subject matter herself in much the same way.
'That's something special that people have told me - regular people who aren't photographers or aren't in that community - that they felt, looking at my work, it reminded them of riding around in a pickup truck with their grandpa when they were a kid over the summer, or something like that, and I take that as a huge compliment,' she said. 'Even if it was just a little moment, of something you saw out the window of a car. That, I think, can be kind of beautiful.'"
