Salted Hands

Salted Hands pairs oral testimony with staged tableaux to survey identity in St. Bernard Parish. Rooted in spoken self-definition, the image is a site where performance meets perception, tracing how memory, vernacular, and landscape script identity.

Salted Hands is an ongoing body of work combining oral history and constructed photography to bridge the fragmented memories of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Set within this isolated fishing community, an outpost defined by environmental flux and systemic pressure, the work explores how identity is verbally articulated and visually interpreted. Rather than documenting the industry, the project interrogates the ways in which language and landscape collide, recording the specific ways an individual maintains their identity while facing a landscape in flux.

In St. Bernard, the landscape operates through a persistent tension between mythic beauty and environmental flux. The local culture is characterized by a combination of durable wit and a refusal to quit. It’s a place where self is shaped through endurance against nature, labor, and the racial inequities prevalent in the American landscape. Identity here is forged through the stories people tell in resistance to both environmental and systemic erasure. This endurance is cataloged through vivid, recurring assertions of presence. These records, defined by an unforced grace, humor, and grit, function as objective proof of belonging, a highly saturated archive of life lived with a direct and permanent connection to the land.

Every image is preceded by relationship, conversation, and oral history. There are people I’ve known for years of whom I’ve only taken a handful of frames. When the camera is not the central focus, a deeper trust develops, revealing the emotional arcs and tonal color of their lives.

Yet, there remains a mutual understanding, I am there to create both an audio record of their history and a visual articulation shaped by it. This dynamic allows for a unique fluidity, creating a space where emotion surfaces freely and the subject can truly perform their self articulated history.

Using a large format view camera and lights I construct narrative tableaux, landscapes, and still lifes inspired by excerpts from individual interviews. These excerpts could be a specific story, emotional arc, or the atmospheric tenor of a space. Choosing the theme or storyline of the image takes place in a number of conversations following the interview. This process is collaborative, though I ultimately make the final choices concerning the image. After the initial blocking, all direction is rooted in the emotional landscape of their stories. Through this process, the photographs become my visual interpretation of their articulated identity, a site where memory, language, and the performance of self converge.

The project utilizes a multi-channel Spatial Acoustic Record (SAR) to establish a geographic and psychological identity. This is not a static background, but a spatial reconstruction of the St. Bernard landscape filtered through a subject’s internal narrative. The acoustic field vacillates between a faithful environmental record and a subjective interiority, mirroring the way memory and landscape collide.

Unfettered oral history is layered directly atop this acoustic record, localized to the specific tableau it inhabits. The soundscape functions as a spatial guide. As a subject speaks, the acoustic hierarchy shifts, drawing the viewer’s focus toward a specific site of inquiry. During undisclosed intervals, the vocal signal recedes, leaving only the Environmental Acoustic Record. Within the exhibition, the physical space acts as a threshold where verbal self-articulation meets the visual performance of self and the viewer's perception.

Salted Hands exists at the intersection of document and construction. Through image, voice, and the tension of my own outside perception, the work reflects on how identity and place are forged through memory, language, and the endurance required to remain.

Archival Note: The Spatial Acoustic Records (SAR) included here are a curated selection from the Salted Hands master archive. The absence of a SAR registry for certain images represents a deliberate editorial choice for conceptual clarity, tailored specifically to the scope of this presentation format.