Waking the Land
In the state of South Carolina, tucked away and almost hidden from the hustle and bustle of city life, are the rural communities and people who work hard and endlessly to maintain the land their families have owned for generations. Not being familiar with a rural lifestyle, my initial purpose of photographing these southern landscapes and the people that inhabit them was to learn about their way of living and the culture and integrity they met each day with. As a photographer, I find it exhilarating to meet and photograph strangers and immerse myself into unfamiliar environments, most favorably the ones I have no knowledge or experience with prior. Perhaps it is my personal way of making sense of the world. It is most apparent that I found the people in these small communities to be some of the wisest, and most hardworking and passionate people I have ever met in my life. Passionate about the land, and about the work they did as well as the stories they told of their past and present. The farmer who speaks of his cows being more sensitive than people would assume, the hired helper originally from Mexico who is happy to teach you how he plants and harvests squash and zucchini, the grandson of the former mayor who takes a break by sitting calmly in front of branches that broke and fell from last night’s storm and the lady who is proud to still own her chicken houses in today’s economy. This series of photographs and the experience of meeting the people and witnessing these landscapes has affected my life and inspired me in ways that are complex in nature yet simple in the meaning of what life in the rural south means to the people that are living it. In all the hours and minutes in the day it took to maintain their land and work with their hands, the most poetic thing I learned about each and every one of them was that no matter how much work they had to do, at the end of the day they always had time to watch the sun set.