My father spent the afternoons of his childhood in Oxford, Alabama walking the train tracks with his grandfather. Their time together offered him an escape from a difficult homelife and inspired him to see beyond his family’s limited opportunities and expectations of him. His grandfather’s love became even more important to him after a terrible accident intensified the toxic nature of his family dynamics. 

As my father ages, he’s still drawn to train tracks, especially those that travel through the small towns of the South. For him, they symbolize hope and boundless possibility. But the sense of comfort they bring will always be accompanied by memories of conflict. 

The book combines original photographs, reproductions of family photographs, and prose poetry written by Leah Worthy. It examines the way opposing emotions wrestle in our memories of childhood, and how, as adults, we never stop pursuing the resolution of our earliest pain.

Oxford Gothic is a part of the permanent collection of rare books at William & Mary and Jacksonville State University. The book received an Award of Excellent at the 2024 PhotoNOLA Festival.

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Edition of 30
112 Pages
47 Original Photographs
4 Tipped-in Archival Reproduction Photographs
4 Prose Poems

Hand-bound
Published by White Peach Press 

Please inquire to purchase

Our family bible dates back to the 1700s. It’s an imposing tome, leather-bound, lavishly illustrated, and weighing around ten pounds. There are pages where births, deaths, and marriages were recorded over the years. Some of the entries provide information that would have otherwise been lost. Others bring up more questions than they answer. The most chilling records a man’s death by hanging in 1860.

When you ask anyone in the family about it, they’ll tell you that Felix Saxon was “the horse thief,” as if this fact explains the grim circumstances of his death.

Tuesday in Mobile was inspired by the horse thief in our family history. We changed the date of his death, but the place became central to the narrative because of the mystic societies established in 1800s Mobile. The only thing we know about Felix Saxon is the one thing he had to keep hidden. He operated in secrecy, just like Mobile’s mystic societies. But every year on Mardi Gras, society members struck up the band and paraded through the streets. What happens when something shrouded in mystery becomes a public spectacle? What happens when our most private selves are dragged out into the light?

Limited copies available here

Tuesday in Mobile is a part of Memory Vistas, a collaboration with writer Leah Worthy. For more information, please click here

In 1994, our cousin, Lara, interviewed our grandfather for a school project. He took his time answering her questions, telling her all his stories, including the one about how he met our grandmother. That story has always been, and always will be, one of our favorites. The romance of it, the way the sight of her altered his life in an instant, the way their love never changed over the years–it reminds us that sometimes, love really is like fireworks.

Lara saved the tape recording she made all those years ago, and we’re lucky to be able to listen to our Daddy Ben tell his stories in his own words, his own voice. When we decided we wanted to tell the story of how our grandparents met, we realized it was best to let him do the talking. What follows is a lightly edited transcript from Lara’s interview. Thank you, Lara, for the gift of being able to listen to him share this story, and for the opportunity to share it with others. It’s a story about fireworks, the kind we ought to believe in no matter what, the kind that lights up the dark.

Limited copies are available here

In the 1950s, my great aunt was stationed with The Red Cross in Orleans, France. This wasn't her first overseas assignment, but it's the one she documented most thoroughly.

She sent home letters, hundreds of prints and negatives, postcards, and luggage tags from her weekend trips to nearby places.

These things ended up in a box and went unsorted for years. During the pandemic, I opened the box at last, and let its contents shape my creative process in a new way that allowed me to stay home, but stay inspired. I connected with the letters as art objects, creating still lives inspired by paper art sculpture. As I spent time with them, I gained insights into her personal history, the history we share as a family, and the history we share as a nation. As a result, the project became a meditation on postwar America and what it means to make sacrifices for a cause greater than ourselves.

 A Way to Return is a series about an unexpected, inward journey home. Landscapes are often powerful conduits of memory, regardless of their geographical location. No matter where you are you can be delivered home by a bend in the road, a horizon crosshatched by power lines, or even a particular quality of light. These images were taken far from my home, but they never fail to take me back there. They function as records of memory and the nature of our relationships with the places we love from a distance.