Session One: Around the Y

This photograph, “Session One: Around the Y” from the “Thundersnow Road" series is an immersive project in which Xaviera Simmons traveled across North Carolina, from coast to mountains, shooting photographs in both rural and urban environments that reinterpret the cultural and physical landscape.

Simmons inserted herself into the settings as anonymous subjects, traveling musicians that appear in the landscape, excavated from the history of the location. Her fictional characters conjure the lore of the landscape and blur the lines of the imaginative and the real to explore the significance of place, music and storytelling in the South.