Photographer Matthew J. Brown’s project, New Developments, investigates the fluctuating story of land use in his home state of Tennessee, where agricultural regions have gradually given way to instances of retail and commercial real estate.
In a combination of materials—from municipal maps, to snapshots of demolition, to juxtaposed scenes of overpasses and children at play—Warwick aims to portray the challenging legacy of Old South Baton Rouge, while gesturing toward the strength and promise of its contemporary residents.
In these photographs compiled from various eateries throughout the South, Julian Castronovo isolates examples of colloquial architecture and interior shots of candid, tableside scenes, all of them unique yet linked, however loosely, by the Chinese-American dining experience.
Rosalind Fox Solomon’s Liberty Theater comes from a period of traveling throughout the South between the 1970’s and 1990’s, documenting the influence of discrimination from Alabama to Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
Drawn initially to these images of displaced funeral bouquets as a distraction from his own grief, Joel Whitaker came to observe these abandoned flowers and sentimental ephemera as a necessary counterbalance to the somber etiquette of death, a reminder of the “impermanence of the original, well-planned, and ordered memorial.”
The stark and vulnerable images in Byan Schutmaat’s project, Good Goddamn, follow his close friend, Kris, in the final evenings leading up to a five-year prison sentence.
The images in Michael Wriston’s project, Ask and it Shall Be Given to You, traverse the often unseen, rural corners of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, capturing the stillness and vivid life of small towns, their residents, and the land that holds them.
For over a year and a half, on the southeast corner of Lake Okeechobee, Sofia Valiente has befriended, lived among and photographed the residents of Miracle Village, an intentional community of over one hundred convicted sex offenders.
In his striking interior and exterior glimpses of the funeral industry in the rural South, Tim Hursley’s photos feature shots of errantly parked hearses, casket showrooms, ranks of carved granite, and portraits of rusted silos and warehouses that look, too, by nature of their juxtaposition, like rows of planted headstones.
In A Southern Myth, Yarbrough’s photos grapple with the persistent tropes, misconceptions, and pressures of belonging in the South, and assume a photographic language where “‘myth’ is used as a poetic device to narrate a struggle for both the artist and the region to maintain a sense of identity.”
