Southern Churches

Southern Churches is an ongoing research project developed over the past five years containing over 150 photographs of churches throughout the South. My methodology could best be described as premised by Walker Evans’ “documentary as means,” which allows me to recollect–that is, to remember but also to artistically create images–of the paradoxes of Southern Christian experience.

Guided by my Southern roots and interest in the sacred places and the ties that bind and abide, I have found that it is often the voices, sounds, and invisible things that allow us to truly see. Rural churches, often centuries-old, some abandoned and some still thriving pepper the sides of winding roads of the American South. Churches are homes to communities and places where the holy and the common meet. Their steeples stand tall against ever-growing foliage as complicated spaces where man attempts to reconcile his humanity with the divine. My images are a meditation on what these spaces can show us today.