What drew your attention to this side of the South? TOM ZOELLNER: Many of the photos in this collection are of decay-a shuttered movie theater, decrepit houses, defunct soda brands, a lot of mold and rust. I met Candler in Sewanee, Tennessee, six years ago when he was contemplating a long-term literary project on what he called “A Deeper South,” portions of which have run at Los Angeles Review of Books. Whenever he can, Candler travels into the backcountry in search of new understandings of what Flannery O’Connor called “the Christ-haunted South.” A quarter century of his photographs from those journeys are now packaged in the collection The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South, 1997–2022, and they evoke a range of moods: loneliness, hope, brutality, and quiet beauty. He now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and five children, where he works as a freelance writer. Yet he took a path through academia away from urban power and glitter that led him to a professorship in the religion department at Baylor University.
He comes from a storied Atlanta family, with philanthropists and politicians speckled all over the family tree like persimmons. PETE CANDLER lives in the South but not always comfortably and not without a strong dose of thoughtfulness.
0 kommentar(er)
