Margaret Sartor: HOME April 5 - August 25 1995

© Margaret Sartor

" I began photographing my hometown in 1985, soon after my father died. Without my father's defining presence, I set out--quite literally--to find my place in th e world. During that same year, I was fortunate to go to South Africa and work with a multi-racial group of photographers. Those photographers were looking beyond the dramatic moments that shape the news, trying to understand the complexities of daily li fe in their own country and often in their own communities. Returning from South Africa, I was pointed towards home.

Born and raised in northern Louisiana, I made most of these photographs on the same streets and in the same houses I knew as a child. Some I made in other locations around the South, particularly during my family's annual summer retreat to the Gulf coast of Alabama. Because I lived most of the time in North Carolina, I photographed during holiday and vacation visits, a few weeks each y ear. This series of pictures, begun almost a decade ago, had taken shape slowly, as relationships within my family have naturally evolved and changed.

Many of these faces I've known and watched since I can remember. And though events in my adult lif e provided clear persuasion to begin this project, I'm convinced the impulse goes back to my childhood diaries, an early and powerful need to record the moments to which I am drawn or connected. Later, making elaborate scrapbooks, I would choose images a nd artifacts from my life to cut and paste and make a story. Like those locked books and bulging albums, these photographs depict an everyday world, present and real, but also a world imagined, seen through the dark glass of memory and longing. Home is something sacred and mysterious, not contained in a dwelling or restricted to relations, though such boundaries have sure meaning. It comes down to a kind of recognition; Home is something felt rather than understood."

--Margaret Sartor