Southern Dreams Collection

The book’s third part, “Southern Dreams,” opens the aesthetic properties of bitumen, asphalt. The photographs—from central North Carolina, Melbourne, Florida and the New Orleans area—are related to family journeys at a complicated time in my life, but the biographical element is suppressed in this presentation. New Orleans occupies a special place in this section, as it did in my life during the 1960s and 70s. More will be said about that in the accompanying essay. Otherwise, there was no specific purpose in taking these photographs, no assignment, no narrative. My presence with the camera was both incidental and determined by my quest for the “bestranged” visionary moment. A country road near my grandmother’s house in Chatham County, North Carolina provided such moments, as did Melbourne, Florida (where my sister lived), still relatively undeveloped and unhomogenized at that time, and capable of providing unexpected moments of connection with that state’s anti-culture. Manifestations of these moments include visual irony, the incongruity of human intrusion (a naïve advertising sign, for example) into a natural setting that dominates the image frame.