Uneven Ground

Over the past few years, I’ve driven throughout southern West Virginia photographing the places I encountered along the way. While I’ve lived in this region my entire life, it was through the process of making photographs that I began to recognize distinctions that extended beyond geography. Moving between the Coalfields and the Allegheny Plateau, I found that changes in the landscape often coincided with differences in the built environment, local economies, and the ways people understood and described their relationship to place.

In the Coalfields, many towns are confined to narrow valleys, their histories closely tied to the industries that established them. On the Plateau, the landscape opens into broader ridgelines, forests, and recreation areas that have come to define the region for many visitors. Moving between these areas, I became increasingly aware of how economic histories, land use, and access to opportunity had produced different relationships between people and place. I also noticed that people's perceptions of the region often shifted with the landscape itself. In some communities, conversations frequently centered on work, population loss, and change over time. In others, the emphasis was more often placed on the surrounding environment, recreation, and attachment to the land. While these perspectives were never absolute, their differences became difficult to ignore.

Rather than presenting these differences as opposites, this work documents them as parallel realities that exist within the same region. The photographs trace a landscape shaped by both extraction and preservation, by communities adapting to economic change and by places valued for their natural character. Together, they form a record of the varied ways southern West Virginia is experienced, understood, and inhabited.