I’m inspired by Ebony Patterson, a Jamaican artist, who also portrays Jamaican working-class people. One of her most memorable exhibits was one paying tribute to the victims of the Tivoli Gardens massacre where hundreds of people were murdered when law enforcement raided the Kingston community in search of a drug lord. No one cared that these people were families.
I spent a month and a half this past summer down in Oxford, Mississippi photographing in different landscapes. And one of the landscapes I ended up photographing was Rowan Oak, which is the William Faulkner estate. And a woman of color, Caroline “Callie” Barr Clark, took care of Faulkner and his family for many generations and had a cabin back behind Rowan Oak. There was the big house and then her cabin. And I was permitted to have models and light and to go into her cabin and shoot and work all over the Faulkner property and bring a new narrative, literally, to that story of Faulkner, Oxford, Ole Miss and all of that.
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