I went to school in Greenville, South Carolina, and one of my favorite pastimes was to wander the back roads of that town. Unlike the north, roads in the south meander wherever they will, backtracking and crisscrossing, delving down into ravines and climbing up sudden hills. A single turn off a main road would find me plunging into a vine-choked valley, creeping past a sun-baked cemetery, or wandering behind the walk-out basements of old YMCA gyms and tree-bound churches. Green streams trickled from old pipes through narrow crevices, Confederate soldier statues stared down from half-forgotten monuments, and red-brick ruins loomed in the thick brush.
My love for photography blossomed in that town. Every time I took a walk I brought a camera, and I was rarely disappointed. I captured strange window displays in empty strip malls, outlandish advertisements for tiny restaurants and car repair shops, masses of Kudzu swallowing entire hillsides, statues with cryptic expressions, the beauty, ugliness, and oddness of downtown. I shot with film and lo-fi digital cameras, in black and white and color, but the results were often the same–beauty in disrepair, the haunted nature of a violently green and heat-smothered landscape. Here are a couple of my favorite images from that place and time.
