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The belief that the mystical is near, that we can interact with it directly, and that the afterlife converges with the present is something that persists in and defines the American South. Folklore and mythic tales trace back to the South’s inception: In the 1800s Lowcountry, enslaved people painted window and door frames a pastel blue made from indigo plants to keep haints away. Ghost stories circulated the plantations, which white settlers collected and leverage as an attempt to portray–– to a postbellum country–– a friendly relationship with those they enslaved while simultaneously asserting their supremacy over them by distorting their stories.
Like the oral histories, physical artifacts of spirituality from peoples pillaged and displaced provide a tangled history of the region and a portal to the past. River baptism sites, stained glass windows on sunken churches, smoke clouds, auburn dirt roads: images of the mystic past are everywhere.
Named after the defunct psychic house down the street from my Savannah home when the series was conceptualized, Mrs. Hope, Psychic Reader, engages with the ghostly presence that steeps the Lowcountry. Creating a link between the mundane and the mysterious, these photographs invite us to recognize that the spiritual forces that shaped the South are ever present.
This series was featured by C41 magazine.