Special Projects II

The Body Tourist in Photo Transparency 

At age twenty-one, newly graduated from college and struggling with depression, I moved to Tifton, Georgia to take a job as a counselor at a halfway house. I rented a tiny apartment whose only redeeming feature was an expansive cornfield out back. Daily walks down the dirt roads between the cornfields became my touchstone, the one thing I could count on in a year that brought my father’s diagnosis of cancer, two unsettling relationships, and the early understanding of what it means to be fully alone. 

So began an odyssey of moves that, fifteen years later, left five houses in its wake: the cornfield apartment, a quadruplex in South Carolina, a house on stilts, a virtual shack in the woods, and a trailer on a horse farm. Combined, these five houses saw me through relationships, career disillusionment, the illness and death of my father, and the changing face of friends and family.    

In 2004 I began writing a book called The Body Tourist about this search for self wrapped around the story of home. In 2010, I told the story via a new art form I called photo transparency, whereby I printed original photos on clear film, then laid them across a painted substrate.  My transparency project, below, followed the outline of the book. The Body Tourist: A Memoir of Hunger and the Search for Home was published by Little Feather books in 2014. 

Cornfield Apartment, Tifton, GA

Midstep Intermediate Care Facility, Tifton, GA

Quadruplex, North Augusta, SC

Quadruplex, Detail, North Augusta, SC

Stilt House, North Augusta, South Carolina

Stilt House, Inside View, North Augusta, SC

Rollercoaster Road, Chickamauga, GA

Rollercoaster Roa d, Inside View, Chickamauga, GA

Singlewide, Chickamauga, GA

Singlewide, Road Leading To, Chickamauga, GA