OF THIS PLACE: Photographs from North Carolina
Write about the land beneath your feet. —Eudora Welty
North Carolina has been my home and my subject since I moved here from New Jersey in 1989. Ever since then I've been traveling around the state making pictures.
In 2008, North Carolina was the third-fastest-growing state in the United States and the fastest-growing state east of the Mississippi River. The state finds itself at a turning point, losing some of its distinctive characteristics to cookie-cutter franchise. As witness to an inevitable transition, I photograph as a way of remembering. Kate Dobbs Ariail wrote, "David Simonton records for us the old North Carolina at its moment of passing."
Forty-five years after beginning, I continue to work in the tradition of straight photography, one that embraces process and the unity of vision and craft. I am a black-and-white-film photographer. I use manual cameras and standard lenses. And I process film and make gelatin silver prints in my darkroom.
I learned about photography in three related ways: By photographing, of course. By looking at photographs and by listening closely to what others said about the medium—about the power of a photograph to make and leave an impression, about the dual (and often dueling) nature of the photograph itself. Is it a work of art? A document? Dorothea Lange said that for a photograph to work both elements need to be present.
While I gladly acknowledge the documentary nature of my work, I am compelled to photograph by the visual aspects of a scene: geometry, beauty—especially as it's perceived in the un-beautiful—and the transforming power of light. Two-and-a-half decades after arriving in the South, I continue to make pictures here as an homage to home, and to reflect my experience of this place.
Construction, Downtown Raleigh, March 1996