I Still Speak Southern in My Head

Finalist Lucie Photobook Award

“Each of our identities is a collage of culture, genetics, and memory. This work is about growing up in the South in the Sixties and insists on a multilayered and nuanced way of looking at that place and time in order to find the connective threads that bring us to the current moment. It feels particularly important to train our attention on craft, and the making of objects to hold onto, that embody human touch.” –Nancy Richards Farese

In her latest book, I Still Speak Southern In My Head, Nancy Richards Farese creates collages that incorporate threads, beads, buttons and cloth with family archive images and recent photographs to create a complex visual memoir in which Farese reexamines her childhood growing up in the South in the 60s. Some of the cultural tropes resonating with the Southern experience that she considers and questions include the culture of segregation, views on female-gendered roles, and the intersections between what we experience as children and what we learn about those experiences and memories of place, home, and family once we've grown. 

This internal and visual investigation is rooted in part in what Farese feels many adults who were children of the south in the 1960s experience, calling it "the Southern Paradox—an experience of beauty alongside violence, defiance alongside shame—and we don’t know what to do with it."

Her response was to consider this paradox deeply, returning to the home in rural Georgia where she grew up to photograph, writing and exploring family archival photographs. The project began during the Covid pandemic while navigating the political, social, and emotional turbulence of that time period. In her essay, she shares how she interacted with the images through symbolic and visual layering.

Collections:
The Emory University Library
The Georgia Tech Library
The University of West Georgia Library


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