It Can Be This Way Always

Since 2008, I have been photographically documenting the Kerrville Folk Festival in Central Texas, an annual 18-day event that has been in existence since 1972. The Kerrville Folk Festival is a non-profit entity that promotes authentic experience, in contrast to some more significant corporate-sponsored contemporary music festivals. This body of work captures the festival-goers, the surrounding Texas Hill Country and Quiet Valley Ranch (host site of the festival), and its transitory yet longstanding community. The large-format photographs depict a distinctive subculture that emerges within an isolated 50-acre ranch and lasts for only one month each summer, uncovering a unique organization of space that reflects both the desire for independent identity and the idealized sense of togetherness. “It can be this way always” is a saying that festival-goers say often; optimistic at best but never fully realized as the people, their relationships, the ecology, themed campsites, and entitlements all change. Another insightful explanation of “it can be this way always” is that festival-goers should take the lessons learned, love shared, and communal understanding gained away from the ranch and into all aspects of life beyond the front gate of the Quiet Valley Ranch.

It Can Be This Way Always focuses on a vernacular of time, the 21st-century event with 20th-century aesthetics, observing the American traveling troubadour and the unique camaraderie and society that develop when such individuals come together. It Can Be This Way Always continues my conceptual interests within a very different environment. Many of the images of individuals and their spaces depict a subversion of the conformity and complications of our modern-day existence and a simultaneous entering into another world that possesses its own unspoken codes of conduct and hierarchy. This environment lacks certain modern physical infrastructure elements and population permanence, allowing an examination of the individual and communal identity in a perpetually fluctuating space. While the landscape and night images provide the atmosphere of this durational event, the portraits offer a typology of performers and volunteer individuals who tirelessly work so the festival ensues every year.

Order It Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festival from UT Press

Exhibited at:
The Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, MO*
Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN 
Strumbu Gallery of Photography at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN*
ThinkBox Contemporary during the Louisville Photo Biennial, Louisville, KY* 
The Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, MO   

*denotes Solo Exhibition