Forks & Branches is an intimate meditation on the people and landscapes of Western North Carolina, where Aaron Canipe was raised. Tinted with a pervasive sense of loss and nostalgia, the project captures the particular poignancy of an adult returning to the geography of his childhood and reckoning with both his love for the place and a new understanding of its deep flaws, “hurt, detachment, and stubborn grace.”
In The Pines Chuck Hemard photographs remnants of the longleaf pinelands to reflect on the significance of loss and beauty in our past, present, and future. Hemard offers a glimpse of what was once “an extraordinary biodiverse ecosystem, rivaling that of tropical rain forests” while also exploring the tension between human settlement, environmental progress, and the beauty of nature.
Richard Max Gavrich’s Across the Brown River explores “memories of past fictions” in towns along the Mississippi River. Inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s obsession with place, Gavrich follows the river in search of the “ordinary and extra-ordinary.”
In Silent Ballad: Time Sings in the Cumberland Plateau, Rachel Boillot explores Appalachia, photographing East Tennessee’s musical heritage along the mountain roads between Signal Mountain and Cumberland Gap.
With a backpack full of disposable cameras, Micah Fields walked over a hundred miles of Houston—his hometown, a city notorious for its “unwalkability”—to capture its vibrant communities and surprising geographical “idiosyncrasies.”
New Orleans is known as the impossible and inevitable city, due to its complex geography that tests the boundaries of human engineering. In her latest project, Virginia Hanusik examines “how a distinct sense of place is perpetuated through the built environment,” in a city whose uniqueness and aesthetic beauty is tied to the uncertainty of rising waters outside of the levee walls.
Taken in moments of tranquil cohabitation rather than scenes of flooding and disaster, Virginia Hanusik’s photographs interrogate the commonplace existence of communities touched by South Louisiana’s struggle with sea-level rise. “Despite the uncertainty that rising seas and coastal erosion bring to the region,” Hanusik writes, “there is hope found in the history of building practices and land migration patterns that are responses to environmental change.”
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.
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.
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.
