Refuge

early this spring, at the beginning of quarantine, my wife and I had the privilege of living at my grandmother's lake house, located between Water Valley and Oxford, Mississippi. She owns about seventeen acres of pine woodland. There is another 100+ acres of property adjacent to her home that she does not own but that is informally shared among her neighbors. We were able to be there just over a month, and I spent most days outside with my dogs, jogging in the woods and swimming in the spring-fed lake. My time there was like pushing a hard reset button on life and career.

All photographs were made near Brown Lake, outside Oxford, Mississippi, in April 2020.

A few weeks into our stay, I began making pictures on the land surrounding my grandmother's home. My work usually involves portraits or some sort of human presence, but making landscape pictures seemed like the most appropriate response to all of the chaos in the world and in my own life. I began to look at nature as a reprieve for myself and notice its quiet resilience.

The last year for me has been filled with devastating loss. My father was murdered, my best friend lost his younger brother to an undiagnosed heart disorder, and the coronavirus pandemic soon followed. The pictures in this series come from a moment when I was reflecting on loss and a year of grieving my father. My dad spent much of his childhood in this North Mississippi landscape, and the process of wandering alone through these woods gave me a sense of connection to him that I hadn't expected. As I look back on these pictures five months later, it is clear to me that I made them in an attempt to look at something lasting in response to the impermanence that had been the overwhelming theme of the past year.

As I walked through the forest, I noticed the various deer stands strategically positioned on hills, tucked away behind trees, or in dark spaces. Sometimes they took me by surprise, and it felt at times as if I were being watched. I began to think about the inherent danger and threat these stands posed to the wildlife that encounters them. The idea that the woods I used as a refuge could also be an inherently violent space was a striking parallel to my life.

I've been told more than once over the last year that grief comes in waves, not chapters or stages. Its timing and effects are virtually impossible to forecast or decipher. As I revisit the pictures from this short month of my life that came and went not long ago, it seems like a different lifetime altogether. I now see the pictures in this series as a testament to my own experience of grief and loss.