Born in Texas, I grew up wearing Wranglers and shooting propane tanks and birds in the backyard with my slingshot and BB gun. We said, "Yes, ma'am," when a woman asked you to do something, and sometimes the only way to settle a quarrel with another man was to punch him square in the jaw.
But I was only a boy, ten years old, when we moved from that flat dry land, and it wasn't okay to say "Yes, ma'am" in the Pennsylvania suburbs. We moved there on account of my dad's job, and it took only one new friend and about three weeks for me to stop listening to country music altogether. I traded in my wranglers for a loose-fitting brand, picked up a skateboard and electric guitar, and slowly began to call myself a city boy.
The folks in Pennsylvania that hired my dad for his familiarity with modern steel-making machinery–the ones that brought us all the way to the other side of the country–didn't ever get rid of the old antique equipment like they said they would, and five years later we had to move again.
Even a Texas boy would raise his eyebrows to the reputation of the state of Alabama, so you can imagine that I wasn't particularly excited about leaving my pubescent friends behind for Lynyrd Skynyrd and mud-wrasslin'. I kept telling myself through the rest of high school that I'd leave the state once I finished school, but after four years of professional book-reading at Auburn University and some international traveling, I grew into my own skin, learned a lot about myself, and found plenty of good reasons to come back home to the South.
The imagery here is wonderful. Tall trees, green everywhere, rolling hills if you go north a bit. Pecan orchards on one side of the road and fields of cotton and collards on the other. The pace here is reasonable; everything seems to move at a comfortable and fairly predictable speed. A lot of the people that drive into the city for work come in the from the country, not the suburbs, and I like that.
My home now–and I have no intention of ever leaving again–is with my wife Amy on the Eastern Shore of Mobile bay. We run Studio A Photography together, and in between weddings and portrait sessions I enjoy taking personal time to photograph food and rustic things, as well as accepting assignments from a few different publications.
