THE INSPIRATION BEHIND WHAT MANKIND LEFT BEHIND

The concept of "What Mankind Left Behind" was born on a hot summer day in 1995, during a four-wheeling trip on a ridgeline in Carter County. At the time I was looking for a personal outlet with my photography - something that I could call my own, something unique, something beyond the cliché of Kentucky photography which has always been horses. I found this in the abandoned lives and discarded mementoes of Appalachia. Eastern Kentucky is one of the few places in the country where people abandon their homes with their furniture and belongings still in tact. On that trip I found an old abandoned home where the sheets were still on the bed and the television was still plugged in the wall. Sitting on an end table was an empty bottle of Kentucky Bourbon and an old shoe. That photo has always been the signature image of this collection. At that moment, I realized that I had just found what I was looking for. It was as if the Lord had opened my eyes for the first time. I then began seeing these types of pictures with absolute clarity. Objects and settings that were either common place or garbage to most people began framing themselves in my mind. I quickly coined the phrase, "There is a fine line between art and junk." I looked for things that had been left behind, things that had not been manipulated by man.

My two family farms in Carter County turned into a visual carnival of objects that represented a different time and a much slower pace of life. The old hand pump water well that was used to draw water on my mother's home place was still there. A highly sculpted glass door knob suitable for the Titanic now rested in contrast against the dilapidated wood of my grandfather's smoke house. The essence of photography lies in the ability to see, and for the first time in my photographic career, I was actually seeing. Without knowing, I had developed an appreciation for the beauty and simplicity of my grandparent's way of life. The Great Depression and Appalachian culture created all of this. It was now my job to document it as art. I love to photograph the things that people take for granted or have just forgotten about. Instead of looking for the spectacular, I see beauty in the little things that were quietly left behind.

In many ways, my vision for this collection of simple photographs has been developing my entire life. My formative years were spent as an only child living at the foot of an Appalachian foothill, known as Rotten Point in Clay City, a small town in Powell County, Kentucky. All of my extended family lived in Olive Hill, which is an equally small town where my parents were born and raised in Carter County. When I was a child I spent many of my summers and weekends in Olive Hill. The influences of both Powell County and Carter County are deeply rooted in the structure of who I am as a person.

I have been involved with photography since my parents first introduced it to me in second grade. My first big break came with the high school newspaper and yearbook during my senior year in 1988. I earned a Journalism degree from Eastern Kentucky University in 1992, which started a four-year stint in newspapers, and has been one of the dominant influences on my photographic-style. Newspaper photography was the best training I could have ever received. It is one of the only photographic disciplines which force you to shoot 24 hours a day, seven days a week, often under adverse conditions. In 1994, I returned to my alma mater as the University Photographer. At EKU I learned to be highly versatile. On any given day, I would shoot studio portraits in the morning, then pack a bag of lights across campus and turn a gloomy chemistry lab into a high tech display, and then I would hunt features in the campus ravine, and return that night and light up the coliseum for a basketball game. I left Eastern in January 2004, to pursue a career as an independent photographer. I would like to thank the University for giving me this exhibit, and for helping to shape my career.