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.
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.
The images in Matthew Genitempo’s Jasper capture the faces, lives, and daily landscapes of men who have chosen to sequester themselves in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri. Attuned to the allure of “running away from the every day,” Genitempo’s project occupies the hazy space “between fact and fiction.”
Bradley Marshall’s Hearing Through Walls is a photographic “exploration into American masculinity, lost youth, and domesticity.” The project often pairs the familiar with the unknown, involving childhood friends alongside relative strangers, and images of places to which Marshall has a deep personal attachment presented alongside photographs of new territory.
Keith Dannemiller’s Wilson documents daily life in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina, as a means of exploring the idea of Home, that illusory place where one fully and completely belongs.
The photographs in Morgan Ashcom’s What the Living Carry are situated in the fictional Southern town of Hoys Fork, a community inspired by the rural Virginia landscape of Ashcom’s childhood and by William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
Devin Lunsford’s All the Place You’ve Got documents the changing landscape along Corridor X, a newly completed interstate project that connects Birmingham to Memphis through a once-remote part of northwest Alabama populated by desolate towns and shuttered coal mines.
Taken over the course of two consecutive summers, the photographs in Rosie Brock’s And Ever Shall Be explore the collision of economic depression and the familiar fantasy of the Southern county fair. A man in a Domino sugar t-shirt sits atop a white horse, a boy in a cowboy hat leans so close to the camera the rest of the world fades out of focus, and a woman, unsmiling, watches a carnival spectacle the viewer can’t see. Meanwhile the sun sets over empty train tracks and a carousel trailer, and the overall effect is at once hopeful and melancholic.
In the Edisto, Mathias Hungler photographs one of the longest free-flowing blackwater rivers in North America, capturing some of the most enchanting points along the river’s “two hundred fifty meandering miles.”
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.”
