Common Memory

Growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, I developed a deep interest in the Southern landscape and the histories embedded within it. Common Memory explores the ways places hold the traces of those who came before us, and how those traces shape the people who inhabit them today.

Across the American South, history exists in the ordinary details of the landscape: in old buildings, worn paths, fences, rivers, and the trees that outlive generations. These places carry stories that are remembered, forgotten, inherited, and sometimes imagined. Over time, the distinction between personal memory and collective history begins to blur, leaving behind a shared understanding of place that is as much felt as it is known.

Through photographs of people, landscapes, and the marks left behind, I explore memory as something continually reconstructed through experience, association, and belief. Rather than offering a definitive account of Southern history, Common Memory invites viewers to consider how the past persists in the present, shaping our relationships to the land and to one another.

The work seeks a moment of recognition: the feeling of encountering a place that seems familiar, even if we have never been there before. In these images, I hope to evoke a shared memory that belongs to no single person, but emerges from the complicated relationship between landscape, history, and the stories we carry with us.