In the stark, quiet images of Summer Time Boys, Alex Christopher Williams explores his understanding of black masculinity in America, communicating his own experience as a mixed race child.
Jeremiah Ariaz documents the longstanding tradition of black trail-riding clubs among Creole communities in South Louisiana, drawing from scenes of their rides to “depict joy, pride, and familial intimacy, particularly between fathers and sons who are taught to care for and ride horses from an early age.”
Richard Schramm captures the town of Enfield, North Carolina—a place that is currently “looking back so that it can look ahead.” Enfield has a rich agricultural history, but like many towns of its kind, mid-twentieth century mechanization upended the local economy. Today, Enfield is home to many abandoned storefronts and warehouses.
Elijah Barrett’s collection, Rockport, chronicles the weeks and months following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. His photographs reveal the devastation enacted upon the landscape, and give insight into the lives of those who are now suspended in a state of wondering what comes next, and who are left to make sense of what happened.
In Scattered Feathers, Dason Pettit documents the probable extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, exploring the “persistent existential crisis” embodied by the search for this bird.
The photographs in Bryan Tarnowski’s The Wishbone aim to excavate the “fertile current of optimism” beneath the more obvious portrait of poverty in the Delta.
In Ponce City Market: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Atlanta’s Largest Building, Blake Burton documents the transformation of the Sears, Roebuck & Company building in Atlanta into the newly restored Ponce City Market. Burton presents “behind-the-scenes views of one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the country.” What began as “casual exploration soon morphed into a passionate desire to document the historic transformation of an architectural treasure.”
The Drake Equation explores a unique space in West Virginia—one that overlaps with the “National Radio Quiet Zone,” a 13,000-square-mile area where radio transmissions are heavily limited to allow for the investigation of extraterrestrial life by enormous telescopes and monitoring devices.
Ben Depp’s Bayou’s End is the result of three years “flying above the bayous and wetlands of southern Louisiana in a powered paraglider,” taking aerial photographs from thousands of feet above the ground. Depp spends hours at a time in the air, waiting for just the right moment to capture the “spaces where the geometric patterns of human enterprise—canals, oil platforms, pipelines and roads—collide with nature’s organic forms.”
The images in Ryan Steed’s Went Out for Cigarettes span four Southern states but are occupied by a common “physical and psychological landscape” shaped by the act of travel itself. Marked by the omnipresence of roadside signs and messages scrawled on windows and walls, Steed’s project is concerned with the witness and discovery inherent in any journey.
