IMG_1126, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

This is the old Vanlandingham house in my hometown. I remember visiting it as a child and picking roses in the back yard. Today it is an empty lot.

Ansley is a fine art and on-location portrait photographer located in Cairo, Georgia. She earned her MFA in Photography from the Florida State University and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Arts Administration. The exhibited work focuses on Ansley’s landscape and interior images of abandoned locations as well as mixed-media work. The 5 large canvases feature images taken using her grandmother’s Brownie camera. The canvases have been stained with tea and native soil. The images are transferred using a heat technique and evoke a feeling of impermanence and the roll and sway of time.

Artist’s Statement: There are people in these pictures. They are just absent from the frame. By examining the discarded artifacts and forgotten places they left behind, I uncover traces of the people who are no longer here. The viewers are encouraged to find context for these objects from their own perspective, and in doing so they reach out and connect to the lost context. These images reveal the dichotomy between simplistic beauty and unremitting hardship. To portray the solitary beauty in the decaying, the mundane, and the abandoned, I photograph my South.

grave, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

She wanted to be buried in her rocking chair.

New Orleans, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

I wake up to this image every morning (and some afternoons). Reminds me of my father.

_MG_4470, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

dairy-freeze, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

Yesterday felt like this kind of spring day – bright, just not full of ice cream.

IMG_6768, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

Do you want to go to heaven?, originally uploaded by AnsleySimmons.

I pass by this sign on my way back from Tallahassee a few times a week. Not entirely certain Cairo is on the way to heaven though.

An enlargement of a Polaroid transfer from 2004. Part of a series titled “The Closet” where I used macro photography to document items in my grandmother’s closet.