Photography
Our work centers on everyday people whose lives are rooted in the soil and woven into the fabric of American society. We are drawn to photography for its power to convey stories—how a single image can speak volumes. Through our lens, we spotlight the builders, planters, caretakers, and laborers of the Deep South—those who nurture »
Photo Essay
I don’t remember much of how the actual city of New Orleans looked when I was a child, especially my surroundings before Hurricane Katrina. Growing up, my lens of the city was my family’s home in the Ninth Ward. Sometimes it felt like my siblings and I were in our own bubble. We usually just »
Photo Essay
“Southern hip-hop has always straddled the line between the struggle and the party, and the culture takes the same approach to how it mourns as a collective.” If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed that the crowd of Black people walking toward State Farm Arena on November 11, 2022, were headed to a »
Photo Essay
“I didn’t fully realize that I was creating a visual archive of a time when hip-hop was deeply rooted in localized lived experiences.” I began my career in photography in Houston, a city where hip-hop was steadily emerging onto the national stage in the 1990s. What started as an underground movement gradually gained momentum, and »
Photo Essay
We came together on Sapelo Island through a vision of how heritage agriculture could help try to save a culture; we came together because Cornelia Walker Bailey had this vision, and this vision required us to work together. We started this work from the conviction that geography, culture, and history are always dyed, stitched, and »
Photo Essay
Born and raised in the American South by a white Northern family, I have felt my experiences and identity straddle a line between the two, even while identifying with both. Growing up, my father took the initiative to teach and cultivate a deep appreciation of history and culture, taking the family to the many historical »
Photo Essay
“What does a liberated life mean for queer southerners and for the folks around us? When will home accept us?” As a child in Birmingham, I saw girls visit my masculine-presenting neighbor at night. They talked through the screen at her bedroom window. I wondered why I’d never see them enter the house, and it »
Photo Essay
“The older I got, the more I realized that our acceptance was . . . fragile, conditional. The signs were small but telling.” FRUSTRATION WITH MY COUNTRY came first. One evening in the early 1970s, my mom and dad debated whether to allow me and my sister to watch a tv news special about the 1963 »
Photo Essay
“To be southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.” TO BE AN IMAGE that regards the historic South’s impression. To be an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, a memory … of that physical and nonphysical region. To feel of the South, and southern, like an accent can. To »
Photo Essay
As quickly as I found myself in the family way, I just as quickly found myself giving birth. A strange birth following a car pile-up. Blood in the crotch of my underwear. Seven layers of skin peeled back and sewn together again in under thirty minutes. Suddenly, a two-pound baby was born, looking anything but »
Photo Essay
It’s hard to believe it has been ten days since the storm. During that time, I’ve driven almost one thousand miles getting into communities that were devastated by Hurricane Helene and running supplies to folks. I traveled to Marion, Swannanoa, Hendersonville, Brevard, Rosman, Ashe County, Chimney Rock, and Bat Cave. In the first few days, »
Photo Essay
“In the most core-shaking moments of my life, I learned to return to these places to move beyond this physical form and ground my spiritual self.” Self-portraiture is the way I navigate myself back to my body. For years, my body did not feel like it belonged to me until I started photographing myself in »