I started making pictures in North Mississippi about 25 years ago to show to Faulkner readers who had never been in that part of the South and could not “see” how closely and accurately Faulkner observed and used his immediate world--the concreteness and specificity of that world--the past, nature, humanity--in creating his myth of Yoknapatawpha. I simply shot whatever reminded me of Faulkner’s world in Oxford, Holly Springs, the hill country, the delta, and along the river. There is no attempt to “illustrate” Faulkner or represent the state of Mississippi, then or now.

When I first read Go Down, Moses, in 1943, I learned two new words: myriad and juxtaposition. These two words became my guide for reading Faulkner. I learned from Faulkner that every particular has existence in a vast complex of creation and that complexity brings about meetings of like and unlike, creating dramas of destruction and, at times, great beauty. Every detail has an essential role in the whole drama: the infinite variety of human beings and their eyes, the mansions, the Grecian columns, the tenant houses, the mules, cows, deer, insects, trees, plants, clouds, the historic markers, the grave markers, the red clay, the sandy soil, the delta, the rain, the river--myriad.  In Faulkner the “setting” is the drama.

The nonhuman components are not just a setting for the human drama. They are actors in the drama. It is this actual drama so observed and mediated in the mind and craft of Faulkner that makes his myth so believable--a convincing melding of the actual and the imagined, the local, the concrete,  rendered parabolic and universal.