Tennessee Reimagined
A Photo Essay by Sarah McFalls
Artist Statement
Memory is a funny thing. My ability to recall events and entire days years later, including what everyone wore, contrasts with hundreds of vague recollections. These photographs are about memory, place, and journey. Shot almost entirely from my car, they are images of chance. I do not plan which two images are exposed on the same frame. I am not even bothered if the two images are misaligned in the frame. In the same way my memory works, for every compelling photograph I get, there are five or six unsuccessful blurs.
Pictures from Memphis capture the landscape that will always be a home. Personal images of my elementary school are paired with more well-known landmarks. They are recordings of a scruffy city that I love and hate.
Knoxville is my current home, and these pictures are a fascination with the rural and urban, the geological and the manmade, and the old and the new that coexist in this city. My most recent and undeveloped roll chronicles the nine hour car trip through Midwestern farmland and is layered with the familiarity of my destination—my grandparents' house.
These photographs are new landscapes of familiar places—places I've been, places that hold on to parts of me, and places I'm going.
Click on first thumbnail above to view as slide show.
Jesus Christ, Light of the World
South Knoxville Water Tower
