A recent road trip to Arkansas has gotten me thinking about another photo series. The seed for this idea was actually planted on a different trip when I was driving home from Santa Fe. The side of the highway was littered with Jesus billboards and advertisements for adult novelty shops. My theme from that trip was to intertwine fear (of God) and sexual repression.
Anyway, on the way to Arkansas I saw much more of this, tons of church displays with scolding messages and also some other telltale Southern scenes. I think I have formulated the idea more to be about a stereotypical South in general: ideologically insular, biblical and repressed. Most of the images were shot from a moving vehicle, which adds a spontaneous and energetic feeling. Obviously this isn’t a cohesive representation of the entire south, just a fragment of some of the more extreme and disturbing cases.
More to come.