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name
Ansley Simmons
media
photography, mixed media
education
Georgia Southern University
BFA Graphic Design, Photography
Florida State University
MFA Studio Art, 2006
web page
There are people in these pictures. They are just absent from the frame. By examining the discarded artifacts and forgotten places they left behind, I uncover traces of the people who are no longer here.
In this series of images I explore two empty houses and the end of the sharecropper economic system and the objects left by the last residents. Shattered glass and various objects left behind indicate that people left in haste. With no other information beyond these artifacts, these places show us the roll and sway of time, the impermanence of things. The viewers are allowed to find context for these objects from their own perspective, and in doing so they reach out and connect to the lost context.
I am a self-appointed regional historian for Chandler, Decatur, and Grady Counties in Georgia. I collect objects from places I revisit: scraps of nature, cotton blossoms, pamphlets, bits of detritus lying on the ground. I am interested in the objects people leave behind, the signs of their existence.
These images reveal the dichotomy between simplistic beauty and unremitting hardship. Due to the slow pace of cultural change in the rural South, the images could easily have been made during any number of eras. But soon, all traces of the sharecropper culture will be gone.
To portray the solitary beauty in the decaying, the mundane, and the abandoned at the end of an era I photograph remnants.