Under These Stones:  Vanishing Reflections of Rural North Carolina

The mystique of Southern identity has long been tied to the land.  The South is a place where history and myth collide; much of it unchanged since before the time of the Civil War.  The earliest Southerners, such as my ancestors, arrived and settled in North Carolina well over 300 years ago.  For much of that time, cotton and tobacco was king, faith was sacred, and the lines between the living and the dead were often blurred.  But over the last 40 years, North Carolina has undergone tremendous change. With the collapse of cotton and tobacco, and the rise of cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro, the face of rural North Carolina is quickly disappearing.  In many places, the small farms and open fields, that I knew in my youth, have been replaced by business parks, housing developments, and strip malls.  As a result, I feel it important to document rural North Carolina as it once was-as it has been-before it is lost

to the future.

This series actually began for me a few years ago.  I was doing a lot of traveling to various places around the South, and would document the places I saw with my camera.  I was amazed at how certain areas looked as though they must have looked for the last 200 years, while others, seemed nothing like the rural South I knew as a child.  It was only after moving from Charlotte to Asheville to Durham, that I began to get a true sense of how these changes were affecting North Carolina.  I noticed that it was becoming more difficult to “get away”, to “get out”, to find areas where I could still feel a real connection to the land that is my home state. 

In my case, I can trace my roots back almost 10 generations to the poor Scotch/Irish farmers who settled, in the North Carolina mountains, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.  For much of that time, my family has owned small tracts of land, on which they’ve grown their own crops, while working in the textile and furniture industries.  Just in my lifetime, I have seen how the collapse of cotton has profoundly affected my father, my uncles and aunts, and my grandparents.  At the same time, all around us, North Carolina has become a modern, thriving state with its eye on the 21st century.  Charlotte is now the nation’s 2nd largest banking center, and the Triangle area, which includes Raleigh, has become known for great advances in

science, technology, and medicine.

This progression has not come without a price, however.  As North Carolina’s modern industries have advanced, while tobacco and cotton have declined, a great toll has been exacted upon the land.  And it is this land, I believe provides the most endearing qualities about our state.  There are few states that can claim majestic, rolling mountains, large areas of open farmland where the eye can see for miles, and a serene beautiful coastline, all within its borders.  These qualities provide a glimpse into North Carolina’s rich history that extends back over 400 years.  But now, modernization is quickly erasing the history of this land, and I fear much

of it is disappearing before it can be documented.

Though this is an ongoing series for me, I feel the current portfolio of work shows rural North Carolina at the cusp of transition.  As North Carolina advances, and more land is invariably altered, these photographs serve to show the value of the land as it is, not as it could be when developed.  I have chosen to document these landscapes in a square format, because it is not the traditional format of landscape photography, and because it is as if I am looking through a small window at the historic land

I love being quickly boxed in.