Our society treats place as a central identifying characteristic, second only to name and followed closely by profession. We all have a catalogue of images in our mind that we call upon when a city, town, or country's name is mentioned and those images help us to form an opinion of place, and those we meet from there. What is it that makes us ‘of’ a place? As a former American expatriate and one who has lived my adult life essentially placeless this is a central question in my work.
Photographs have the ability to expand and compress time. They speak of what was, what is, and what will be. We look to photographs to remember and often reenact what we see, pushing old images into the future. Alan Watts said "A myth is not something simply untrue but rather a myth is an image, in terms of which we try to make sense of the world." In my ongoing project 'Imag[in]ing America' I am interested in investigating national, regional, and local identity myths as well as ideas of otherness as they relate to place and documentary photography in America.
'Imag[in]ing America,' depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and it is also my discovery of the dreamland that still is America. Located in northern Georgia and situated amongst the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, Rabun is steeped in cultural specifics associated with both the Deep South and Appalachia. It is a place with a long memory, populated by families that often trace their lineage to the founding of America.
