An interview with the photographer from 1999.
I suppose one definition of propaganda (or pornography?) might be: art that denies the mysterious.
At seventeen, Joseph Wright left his working-class neighborhood of redbrick row homes and Italian restaurants in South Philly to spend a crisp spring and boiling summer in the woods of western Virginia.
When Ben Metcalf’s first novel, Against the Country, was published in January of this year, it drew scant attention from the world we designate “literary,” and none from the marketplace of what we call ideas. But another look reveals that Metcalf seems guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of sentences written with intent—sentences of extraordinary interest and beauty, originality and art, drama and delight.
A poem from the Fall 2017 issue.
in Indy than Virginia, fewer mountains,
less green for our eyes, and our cat
wasn’t born there, she was born here,
under the house, and if nothing
Thomas Jefferson, Pharrell, and more notes on the state of Virginia
Now, when strangers ask me where I’m from, I say, “Virginia Beach. We gave the world Pharrell. You’re welcome.” Pharrell was the black cosmopolitan force that proved my home wasn’t country. He was a living rebuke of what Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, his only book, in which he says you would “never . . . find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”
The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCullly Brown is out today from Persea Books.
For the past month, The William King Museum in Abingdon, Virginia, has presented Transience a group photography exhibition showcasing the work of Trish Gibson, Joshua Harr, and Amber Law, three students from East Tennessee State University. Exhibited collectively, the trio’s work examines the fleeting nature of personal experience and how local environments change over time.
Source and Confluence, by Scott Jost, explores the origins and tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Through his images of floods and rapids, scenic overlooks and weedy river banks, Jost searches for signs of balance between human interests and natural systems.
