“The Fishing Hole,” 2015. PHOTOGRAPH © AARON BLUM
The Photo Booth feature on the New Yorker‘s ever expanding online offering is a reminder to us of Milo’s camera, in hibernation while he settles into the homestead in the rolling hills of Central New York. We hope that hibernation ends soon, but meanwhile:
Another Side of Appalachia
Appalachia is not a corner of the United States that cameras come to fresh. Artist-visitors have been making visual shorthand of the rural region for decades, and they have tended to seek the place’s more derisive scenes: the folded flesh of the obese, the writhing snakes of the Pentecostals, the scabbed injections of addicts. These subjects are there for the finding, but the photographer who focusses only on the sordid or the sensational has an outsider’s narrowness of vision. Harder to capture, and far more revealing, are the mysteries of Appalachia as they appear to Appalachians.
“A Guide to Folk Taxonomy,” a series by the West Virginia-born photographer Aaron Blum, offers the latter kind of testimony, and its self-reflexive title suggests the psychic peregrinations that Appalachia can demand of its sons and daughters. Shot over three years throughout West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the project shows an Appalachian struggling to anchor and explore his identity against the region’s prevailing narratives…
“Bleeding Hearts and Fables,” 2015. PHOTOGRAPH © AARON BLUM
See the full sampling and read the whole post here.
Organikos 