In his project, Piedmont, Graham Hamby comments on the cycle of land development—creation, disrepair, and abandonment—with photographs of painted murals, abandoned storefronts, and spare landscapes.
With painstaking clarity, Dalton captures scenes from Louisiana bayous, small-town Alabama, and urban centers of Texas, documenting a pervasive sense of isolation across the South and the hope that defies it.
Consisting of images of rushing streams, secluded lakes, and the structures that disrupt or contain these waterways, the Savannah River Basin Photographic Survey depicts water as both a vital resource and a recreational point of connection.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Strembicki photographed forty-four houses of worship in the Lower Ninth ward of New Orleans, then revisited them year after year, speaking with pastors, deacons, and members, recording the state of their church and its structures.
Based in Oxford, Mississippi, White has spent the past twenty years exploring reservoirs, and her project, Southern Oceans, relies on “photography’s potential to de-familiarize the harnessed water of enormous public-works projects, transforming them into newly imagined landscapes.”
In 2010 Ashley Jones began documenting the homes, businesses, and churches affected by the Earl T. Shinhoster Bridge on Interstate 16, one of Savannah’s “flyover” highway structures.
Viewed successively, Clay Maxwell Jordan’s project, Nothing’s Coming Soon, strives to “counterbalance images of death, mortality, and decay with those of grace and unmitigated beauty.”
Thinly populated, rich in tone, and defined by wide, flat spaces and structures, Paradise’s images display the peculiar mix of isolation and liveliness unique to Dorsa’s home state.
Sensing herself “growing damp and static,” Grace Ann Leadbeater left Florida in 2012, thrilled by her escape. But soon she began to recognize—and long for—the joys of the place she once begrudgingly called home.
Told though the hybrid means of diptychs, overlaid polaroids, archival materials, and more, Alec Kaus’s Haunts and Related Incidents creates a “nebulous yet self-contained constellation” of images inspired by the W.P.A. Georgia Writers Project collection.
