Colin Todd is an artist who lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA of Fine Arts from Louisiana Tech University in 2006 and his MFA of Photography/Transmedia from Syracuse University in 2009. He has exhibited his work internationally with shows at Skulpturenpark in Berlin, Broad Street Gallery at the University of Georgia, RIT School of Art and Rochester Contemporary Arts Gallery in Rochester, NY, as well as the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. ![]()
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Young Buck
The South has such a strong identity and its contemporary inhabitants are aware that the rest of Americans know this. It is no longer an isolated quirky culture in the backyard of America. The “old South” has become diluted in a region of condensed strongholds and disappearing pockets of the way things used to be, the decomposing banal and the surviving peculiar. The South is a place married to its history, but what do the children of that marriage look like?
When I return home, a rush of humid air hits me and I smell the earth. My childhood surges back in an instant and I am filled with nostalgia and then remorse. Nostalgia because I am a southerner and the smell of the red clay carries me back. Is there remorse because I know the bloody, dark history of the South that lies under that earth? We built over that history that still bubbles up to the surface, staining through as much hospitality and religion.
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Now that I have moved away, I wrestle with the idea of what it is to be southern. I share an affinity for the humid landscape that will forever be in my blood. Culturally, however, I do not share the same romanticism of the South and its history like some southerners do. In order to appreciate something Southern, I found you have to know its past, understand its history, and ignore its current condition. The façades of the best soul food restaurants and barbeque shops are decomposing in the sun, yet the recipes have survived the test of time and business is booming. The South’s past is too peppered with inequality, ignorance, and an obstinacy for me to overlook all of these problems and carry any sense of Southern pride.
Between or behind the Super Wal-Marts, Piggly Wigglys, and Great Outdoors-Bass Pro Shop Megaplexes is an even deeper-rooted culture that seems to survive through civil rights movements, the declining education, and the corporate re-branding of the South. It is a culture that is as simple as soul food but as complex as family history. The humid air, the bleaching sun, and stubborn pride: these things have been and will always be a part of the South.
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There is a subtle struggle in being a young Southerner, where you are often caught between a crude inheritance of belonging and the prospects of escaping the South. That conflict is evident in the gaze of a young father and his new kid, or in eyes of a sister or daughter on the brink of growing up. While most of the images are of “usual” people or places in the South, they describe something beyond what is in the composition. I am searching for my generation’s role in the South, through the stories told to us by the land and its people.
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The photographs simply describe how the South is now, the place and its people. The subjects of the portraits hold a confrontational gaze with the camera, though there is a sense of familiar acceptance. While I grapple with my own Southern identity and my mixture of love and distrust for the place, I feel a kinship with the people I photograph. They hold a gaze with me that is both coarse and tender, returning my impression. They allow me to share and capture moments with them that reveal who they are as much as who I am.
On the surface, most of the people and places in the photographs look like they could be anywhere in rural America, and maybe that’s the point. This is what the South has become. But there is also something in the quality of light, a glace from a local, and the condition of the landscape that is truly Southern. It’s feeling toward land and kin that supersedes politics and economics and will be carried with every southerner if they leave or not.
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To view more of Colin's work please visit his website.
Young Buck
The South has such a strong identity and its contemporary inhabitants are aware that the rest of Americans know this. It is no longer an isolated quirky culture in the backyard of America. The “old South” has become diluted in a region of condensed strongholds and disappearing pockets of the way things used to be, the decomposing banal and the surviving peculiar. The South is a place married to its history, but what do the children of that marriage look like?
When I return home, a rush of humid air hits me and I smell the earth. My childhood surges back in an instant and I am filled with nostalgia and then remorse. Nostalgia because I am a southerner and the smell of the red clay carries me back. Is there remorse because I know the bloody, dark history of the South that lies under that earth? We built over that history that still bubbles up to the surface, staining through as much hospitality and religion.
Now that I have moved away, I wrestle with the idea of what it is to be southern. I share an affinity for the humid landscape that will forever be in my blood. Culturally, however, I do not share the same romanticism of the South and its history like some southerners do. In order to appreciate something Southern, I found you have to know its past, understand its history, and ignore its current condition. The façades of the best soul food restaurants and barbeque shops are decomposing in the sun, yet the recipes have survived the test of time and business is booming. The South’s past is too peppered with inequality, ignorance, and an obstinacy for me to overlook all of these problems and carry any sense of Southern pride.
Between or behind the Super Wal-Marts, Piggly Wigglys, and Great Outdoors-Bass Pro Shop Megaplexes is an even deeper-rooted culture that seems to survive through civil rights movements, the declining education, and the corporate re-branding of the South. It is a culture that is as simple as soul food but as complex as family history. The humid air, the bleaching sun, and stubborn pride: these things have been and will always be a part of the South.
There is a subtle struggle in being a young Southerner, where you are often caught between a crude inheritance of belonging and the prospects of escaping the South. That conflict is evident in the gaze of a young father and his new kid, or in eyes of a sister or daughter on the brink of growing up. While most of the images are of “usual” people or places in the South, they describe something beyond what is in the composition. I am searching for my generation’s role in the South, through the stories told to us by the land and its people.
The photographs simply describe how the South is now, the place and its people. The subjects of the portraits hold a confrontational gaze with the camera, though there is a sense of familiar acceptance. While I grapple with my own Southern identity and my mixture of love and distrust for the place, I feel a kinship with the people I photograph. They hold a gaze with me that is both coarse and tender, returning my impression. They allow me to share and capture moments with them that reveal who they are as much as who I am.
On the surface, most of the people and places in the photographs look like they could be anywhere in rural America, and maybe that’s the point. This is what the South has become. But there is also something in the quality of light, a glace from a local, and the condition of the landscape that is truly Southern. It’s feeling toward land and kin that supersedes politics and economics and will be carried with every southerner if they leave or not.
To view more of Colin's work please visit his website.