Upland Ghosts

The land we occupy today is not ours. The earth beneath our feet, the roads, and the homes we make are the culmination of an incalculable number of decisions made by those who came before us.

Upland Ghosts is a meditation on this observation. The project is a means to come to terms with the cultural and economic weight that now grounds the United States’ Tennessee in the contemporary.

These images — digital scans of 120 mm film photographs — document the Tennessee landscape in its perpetual transformation. This includes plantation grounds now occupied by an automobile manufacturing site, the graves for those who fought for the Confederacy, homes and places of business slowly turning to rubble, and a tourist motorway carved out from an ancient trade route used by the region’s earliest inhabitants, seemingly washed away by their frontiersmen and homesteaders who forcibly took their place.