I Still Speak Southern in My Head

Limited advance copies available at:
ICP Photobook Fest, New York City, September 6-8
Unseen, Amsterdam, September 19-22
Miss Read, Berlin, October 11-13.

Expected to ship in November.

Each of our identities is a collage of culture, genetics, and memory. 

With these collages, presented in the book I Still Speak Southern in my Head and drawing from the traveling exhibition ADD|MIX|FOLD, I am reexamining my childhood in the South in the 60s to investigate the influences of embedded segregation, a specific model of womanhood, and a deep and fraught tie to home and place shared by many folks from the South. ADD|MIX|FOLD functions as a visual memoir, wherein I’ve sewn and cut into my 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.

These multimedia pieces combine photography with thread, fabric, beads, and buttons to complicate notions of static or singular identity. Sewing allows me to layer and challenge the image, to explore how memory can be fictionalized, photographic, and emotional. The work is intentionally tactile, handmade, to push back against the ephemeral nature of digital and AI generated imagery. These pieces are one of a kind; these pieces are defiantly human. By paying homage to traditional women’s crafts, ones I learned myself as a girl, this project bittersweetly anticipates a future where we may have little tangible evidence of our domestic lives.

Author: Nancy Richards Farese
Editor: Arielle Greenberg
Design: Caleb Cain Marcus, Luminosity Lab

ISBN: 978-1-959684-08-4
Dimensions: 8 x 10.85  inches
Number of pages: 64 with tip ins, and smaller pages
Binding: Hardcover Swiss

Expected to ship in November.