Built on Ashes
The project is centered around the small Mississippi community of Oxford and was initially born of an interest in the constant construction that constitutes the growing pains of this small college town. However, the project grew beyond those constraints over time and I saw a chance to look at topics like class, race and poverty, as well as themes like aging, permanence and purpose.
Ultimately, the project addresses a strange kind of synchronicity that keeps recurring in the images. Certain photographs loop into and out of others. Some stories are part of other larger stories, but always there is the process of a place and a people revising their location and what it means to live there. Oxford is a place of contradictions, composed of deep class divisions and startling cultural conformity, but it is also a place of indestructible individuality. This uniqueness is often built on the ashes of the trends that came before.