Homeland (2017-2019)

Selected Silver Gelatin Prints from the series.

I know from what I’m grown.

I chose to leave: I had to. I had grown as much as I could within my homeland. Where I am from in The Midwest—first from central Kansas and then onwards to Missouri—we are built proudly from black soils and grown strong along great rivers feeding wild grasses, cottonwoods, and wildflowers set within their rolling hills beneath deep sky. In the Low Country, it’s not so.

Here there is no sky (and what there is is swallowed up by short, wide oaks) and the rivers are brackish; the only plains flood twice daily with the tides. But there are glimmers of what I know in the train tracks (though not of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line up to Topeka), and there is one grain elevator out o’er the river. These few places I well know, and they know me.

Through the tactile work of darkroom photography, loving and accepting and working solely with cameras owned and loved by countless others come before, I have set to do my duty to the land from which I’m bourn and those who labored to make it what it is—and me what I am—and with the works of my own hands, they will remain. I have no choice.