It’s All a Song Here shows Queerness in the United States South, acknowledging its uneasy position between reckoned with and at odds. There is an expectation that Southern Queers should want to leave the region. Here the camera works as a witness to stabilize our existence and reinforces the nuance that is interwoven with the fraught dialogue of what it means to be from this place.When I moved from central Georgia to New York City I was met with the quick expectation that I must be grateful for the way I never caught my grandparents’accent. I resent that and instead come to know Southern Queer as its own identity, intrinsically enveloped in iterations and adaptations of tradition, land, and history.  Each photograph is the result of considered relationship building between myself and individuals who identify as from the South and also part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Before photographing, we sit down together to conduct an interview that allows them to establish their own presence within the process. These interviews fill the content of each frame.

The South suffers a lack of resources. It is engulfed in an imported mythos about itself. It has devoured the words, and in turn, regurgitated them, resulting in a self-reliance and resiliency that mirrors the same kinship Queerness must create to exist with grace towards a futurity of expansiveness.