Evening Land

This apocryphal album has grown from fifteen years (2003-2018) of photographing along a particular stretch of the American Bible Belt from my family’s home in the highlands of northeast Tennessee to the geodetic center of the continent in the Kansas heartland.

This work is deeply influenced by my own family albums and by the little red backed hymnal my grandfather sang from. He was a preacher and gospel singer, and it was my view from the rear window of his car as a boy returning from various revivals and church services with those powerful and sometimes frightening sermons and hymns still in my mind that has colored my vision of this place ever since.

The pictures extend from the Tennessee Valley to the Solomon Valley in Kansas before ending in quiet elegy in the center of my evening land at the Shiloh battlefield. I slowly discovered the pictures at Shiloh to be an ending to this work as well as the beginning of a partner project.