In her latest book, I Still Speak Southern In My Head,
Nancy Richards Farese creates collages that incorporate threads, beads, buttons and cloth with family archive images and recent photographs to create a complex visual memoir in which Farese reexamines her childhood growing up in the South in the 60s. Some of the cultural tropes resonating with the Southern experience that she considers and questions include the culture of segregation, views on female-gendered roles, and the intersections between what we experience as children and what we learn about those experiences and memories of place, home, and family once we've grown.
I Still Speak Southern In My Head stems from a traveling mixed media exhibition entitled ADD|MIX|FOLD that includes the hand-crafted photographs shown in this book. Farese sews and cuts into her photographs to create objects that reference the influence the past holds on our lives in the present. The title comes from a family pound cake recipe, and serves as a metaphor for how we blend and slice up stories and memories to make sense of ourselves during these extraordinary, frenetic, ephemeral times.
This thoughtful and engaging book also includes an essay by Farese in which she shares insights and realizations that developed as she delved deeper into the project. She writes,
Even as I work to make sense of my own complex history, I find myself explaining the South to those who still view the region with suspicion, saddled with the moral burdens of racism and injustice. It’s clear now that racism is less a Southern problem than an American problem. I believe that not talking about these things has consequence, and that the only past we are truly conversant in, and can take responsibility for, is our own.
This internal and visual investigation is rooted in part in what Farese feels many adults who were children of the south in the 1960s experience, calling it the Southern Paradox—an experience of beauty alongside violence, defiance alongside shame—and we don’t know what to do with it.
Her response was to consider this paradox deeply, returning to the home in rural Georgia where she grew up to photograph, writing and exploring family archival photographs. The project began during the Covid pandemic while navigating the political, social, and emotional turbulence of that time period. In her essay, she shares how she interacted with the images through symbolic and visual layering.
I began to sew, bead, paint, and quilt on other family photographs to create things to hold onto as personal anchors. Tactile by design, the dimensional nature of the work suggests both assembly and exclusion. Stitching is, after all, our most ancient form of repair.
The intentionally tactile and handcrafted nature to this visual overlay resulted in the creation of one of a kind pieces, similar to the unique experience of our own lives and own memory bank. Farese also notes that the work is undeniably human.
About the artist:
Nancy Farese is a photographer, author, and entrepreneur whose work promotes visual storytelling as an essential tool for social good. An award-winning documentary photographer, she has worked extensively for international development organizations including the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, CARE USA, RefugePoint, and the Carter Center. Farese holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School and was a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Her writing has been published in the NiemanStoryboard, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and San Francisco Chronicle. She is the founder of the visual storytelling nonprofits PhotoPhilanthropy (2009) and CatchLight (2015), and is a board member of Southwire Company, NPR Foundation, and CatchLight. Originally from Carrollton, Georgia, Farese now lives in Marin County, California.
www.nancyfarese.com
@nancyfarese
