Ryan Steed is a Memphis-based photographer and educator. He completed an MFA in Photography at Memphis College of Art, where he currently teaches darkroom and social documentary photography. He has recently exhibited work in Memphis, Little Rock, Portland, Minneapolis, and Brooklyn, and his work has been published by Aint-Bad and Number:Inc.
The images in Ryan Steed’s Went Out for Cigarettes span four Southern states but are occupied by a common “physical and psychological landscape” shaped by the act of travel itself. Marked by the omnipresence of roadside signs and messages scrawled on windows and walls, Steed’s project is concerned with the witness and discovery inherent in any journey.