SAID/UNSAID

Said/Unsaid is an on-going photographic exploration of my kin and childhood home. I was raised below the poverty line on a commune of sorts, in the Appalachian region of the American Southeast. We still call this land the Ridge. Over the past four decades, my father has built several houses entirely out of salvaged materials. The houses are architectural hybrids that echo the amalgamation of lives that inhabit them. Even during construction, these structures were filled with friends, relatives, and members of the community in need of affordable housing.

During my childhood, our scavenger lifestyle was presented as a conscious refusal to join the Capitalist ethos of American society in the 1980’s. I was told that hunger was simply a part of life. I was taught that sustainability is a cyclical process, based in the reuse of available materials. I left home at sixteen with an empty belly, seeking my own way in the world.

Almost a decade later, my father entered an arranged marriage with a Cambodian woman named Chorvry Tek. I missed their courtship of letters, marriage and the birth of my little brother. I was on the other side of the world teaching ESL in Korea when a family friend sent me a video clip of their nuptial parade through her home village. As I watched, the distance felt strange, like a hole to crawl into. I moved back to the American South, began to visit regularly and to make these photographs.

The culture and community of the Ridge has since shifted from a white hippie-hilllbilly bohemianism towards something more grounded, more present and aware of the world. As the changes occur, these ways of being - one aging and one unfurling - exist side by side. The emerging generation, almost entirely of mixed race and cultural heritages, seem so aware of the world beyond the boundaries of family. For better or worse, they have access to technology and media, to information and obfuscations. This project is my way of documenting those juxtapositions while forging and mending relationships with loved ones. It is a process of recognition.

Said/Unsaid is a record of a particular clan, at a specific time and place, seen through the eyes of an adult child returning to their homeland. I see family, I see complicity, I see transformation and I see grace.