Out in the woods of the Deep South, there's a cemetery where my entire family is buried. My living grandmother has her headstone. My parents and I have our plots. As we live and breathe, the catastrophe has, in a way, already happened.

I believe I've absorbed some essence of this place after so many years here and so this work, these “self-portraits” chasing my internal dialogue as it manifests in the chaos of the natural world, has been a search for that essence I’ve begun to call “Death” for simplicity. Truly, I think it’s an awareness of impermanence this place taught me early. You have already been and you will die, and you will die here—an existential confinement, a catastrophic inevitability. This intertwining of my mortal coil, my familial heritage, and a writhing, tortured earth is what lies at the heart of this place, my place, both literally in my grave and conceptually in how I understand my people and culture—the Gothic, maybe, at the heart of my Southerness.

Then, what about the function of the photograph in this place? The camera also binds a subject to a moment on its existential timeline. This apparatus imposes the same Death, so what is my photographic act? Might I give these subjects rest by making their photograph—lay them down? Or might I revive them for all time, as evidence I saw them this way?

Lay Us Down is my wrestling with all of this; a fragile collection of images depicting home, family, belonging, whose subjects are bound, like me, between our own catastrophes. Maybe each photograph, like my cemetery plot and like this place, is that catastrophe already.

Early on, I searched the canon for an image-maker engaging with the complexities of this Southern place. Dawoud Bey was, for me, the first to invoke a friction between this landscape's unseen narratives and its inhabitants' contemporary invocations of hospitality and heritage, but as a Black man which I am not. However, that work revealed to me a reciprocal, seen narrative in the slow death of this place set against the backdrop of its mythical institutions—of nostalgia and decay. And furthermore, I began to question my place in that present narrative; what it meant to belong, to feel at-home here as those institutions' ancestral representative; what that decay meant for my living; what price I would have to pay for that nostalgia.

The conception of this work draws heavily from Camera Lucida, wherein Roland Barthes references Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Lewis Powell before Powell's execution. Gardner’s images, as all images, engage both the “that-has-been” and by extension, the “this-will-die.” The photographic act and the produced image become a collective acknowledgement of the subject’s and even the photographer’s assured death. I wonder though, for Lewis Powell—Alabama-native and Confederate conspirator—I wonder if he had not already embodied some catastrophic inevitability by the time he was wounded at Gettysburg, or by the time he attacked Secretary of State Seward in his home, or by the time he encountered Alexander Gardner and his camera aboard the USS Saugus, the day before his inescapable end.