- Native Ground
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[End Page 21]
As between clear blue and cloud,Between haystack and sunset sky,Between oak and slated roof,
I had my existence. I was there.Me in place and the place in me.
—Seamus Heaney, “A Herbal”
For the past twenty years, I have made a career as a teacher of American literature. For the last twelve, I have worked also, with equal seriousness and passion, as a photographer.
My new series, Native Ground, unites these pursuits in an exploration of the role place plays in shaping the literary imagination: the notion that writers compose out of a peculiar understanding and depth of connection to physical space, remembered or immediate.
Personal and professional interests have led me to focus on writers who have lived and worked in the southern region of the United States. After all, if convention has it right, these are writers who bear something close to a genetic predisposition to produce a literature suffused with place. It seems to me that Eudora Welty is right in saying that “of all the arts, [writing] is the one least likely to cut the cord that binds it to its source” (“Place in Fiction,” On Writing [Modern Library Edition, 2002], 42).
Using a primitive hand-held film camera, for this series I am making images that depict points of origin—meditating on personal spaces and landscapes in light of my familiarity with and curiosity about selected writers’ works and biographies. They are particularly intimate photographs that propose narratives of connection in the development of vision and voice.
In this regard, the photographs in Native Ground are themselves a kind of supreme fiction: my imagination of how physical spaces, lives lived, and art converge. [End Page 22]
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