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  • Front Porch
  • Tom Rankin

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Shelton Hedgepeth's pier, Bee Lake, Holmes County, Mississippi, 2006. All photographs by Tom Rankin.

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I have always been drawn to those places that mark the landscape, serve as our monuments of remembrance and guide our way and knowledge of the local, seeming to last in our consciousness even when they have nearly disappeared on a return to their previous unbuilt state. "It's over there where Cedric's house used to be," we might say, giving directions to someone. I am also forever lured into those landscapes where humanmade structures seem to insist on inevitable presence with a kind of naïve arrogance, precariously attempting to coexist with the natural world at the peril of both. Surveying the southern landscape, we find countless examples of the built world that project confident illusions of permanence, environments created for singular and communal purposes that are fully a part of what's truly here, but also what is perpetually going and destined to be gone. This Built/Unbuilt special issue, so beautifully guest edited by Burak Erdim, brings insight and conversation to all of this, from the nuances of building a home in a new place to our collective quest to discover paradise in tarnished, overbuilt landscapes.


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John R. Lynch monument, Greenwood Cemetery, Jackson, Mississippi, 2014.

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My first impulse as a young photographer was to make pictures of people, often portraits, with only a passing interest in photographing what I considered the inanimate—the cultural landscape of the built world. I had even less interest in making images of the purely natural world. I thought somehow to express anything visually about the human experience required humans in the picture; to be sure, this was the urge of the novice finding a path with a camera, beginning a long apprenticeship of discerning just how best to interpret, express, and reveal the human condition. I've always remembered Walker Evans's comment to a group of Harvard University students two days before he died: "I am fascinated by man's work and the civilization he's built," he said. "I think that's the interesting thing in the world, what man does." Reflecting on my own photographs of what we find in the landscape, of constructed worlds, I discover abiding themes of making and unmaking, the built and unbuilt, the overlooked and the disappearing.1

over two decades ago, I met Shelton "Plum" Hedgepeth at a hunting camp in Lodi, Mississippi. Shelton earned his nickname from his work as a plumber, and I knew him for several years before I learned his given name. A number of years ago, my friend Wiley Prewitt and I went to visit and fish with Shelton at his home on Bee Lake near Tchula, Mississippi, in Holmes County. His house was perched on the edge of the oxbow lake so that he could nearly roll out of bed and into a fishing boat. A tenacious outdoorsman, Shelton was driven day-to-day mostly by the challenge of catching that next fish, harvesting yet another deer, finding a way to be fully within the unpredictable wonder of the natural world. With the help of his carpenter nephew and assistant, Shelton imagined and constructed one of the most beautiful and simple docks I've ever seen on a lake, a slender treated-lumber pier that snakes its way through a stand of Mississippi Delta cypress trees. No matter how close we get to the water's edge, there always seems to be the lure and desire of being just a bit closer, to even more fully experience the water.

To build in the water is its own challenge and enterprise, physically trying with the necessary acceptance that anything built there is fundamentally temporal, regardless of the quality of construction. For Shelton, it was all about finding a way to exist alongside and within the wildness of the lake, the cypress trees and mosquitoes, the meeting of land and water. To witness the beginning of a building project such as this pier is a gift. I don...

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