Carson Reeher, artist
Michael Mergen, faculty advisor
awarded third place in the visual works category
This is a series about Farmville, VA. On the surface it may speak of a town aging, a town filled with people, buildings, ideas that are stuck in the past, not moving or changing, slow.
Slow like my summer days spent sitting in the café, eavesdropping on conversations just to pass the time and later my hours spent listening to the stories of locals. Slow like my process of photographing using a 4×5 view camera. Like waiting for the perfect expression before releasing the shutter, or anticipating the car that’s about to drive by and break the stillness of a landscape. Just like waiting for the fair to come to town each year or Saturday Farmer’s markets each week. Like my way of finding meaning to these photographs, the meaning to this town, slow. Not just a way of describing speed or a state of mind, but a state of living.
It’s about a place people choose to come to and then realize twenty, thirty years later they never left. Where someone’s story began a hundred years before they were born. It’s a place that doesn’t want to be looked at too long, but leaves people staring. A place where if you’re lucky someone will stop and tell you their story the right way, nice and slow.