KAMARA THOMAS

FOLKLORE: LIVE AT CASSILHAUS

“To A Soth Photo, 7” was commissioned by Cassilhaus (a creative incubator space in Chapel Hill, NC) in response to a photo by Alec Soth, as part of their exhibit "Ekphrasis: eight artists respond to images from the history of photography.” 

NOTES, by Ekphrasis curator Jessina Leonard—

In 2017, I was working as the Project Manager at Cassilhaus, a photography gallery, artist residency program and private photography collection in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. One afternoon late that fall, the director, Frank Konhaus, and I started to throw out artists' names who did not work in photography but who engaged in some way with the history of photography. I mentioned my friend, Max Adams, who had done a series of drawings in response to Eedweard Muybridge's early photographic explorations of motion. Frank mentioned a painter, Damian Stamer, who had been doing a series of paintings at the same locations of many of Dorothea Lange's photographs from Depression-era rural North Carolina.

As we threw around these names, we began to imagine an entire exhibit of non-photographic artists responding to particular images from the history of photography. We wanted to draw on a variety of mediums – from writing and drawing to weaving and collage – and, by doing so, offer a broad sweep of photographic history reimagined through contemporary eyes. We borrowed the title of the exhibit from a term used in poetry – ekphrasis – for poems that in some way respond to a work of art, usually through description, interpretation or critique. In a similar way, the artists in our exhibit used a different medium to describe, interpret or critique a photograph. As a curator, I wondered what could be gained in the translation from one medium to another.

As the exhibit came together, I wanted to make sure we included contemporary photography as well as historical photography. The Cassilhaus Collection includes a beautiful image by Alec Soth from his book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, a defining publication in contemporary photography which documents the loneliness, longing and reverie of the Midwest. The image in the collection, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is a quiet photograph of a worn wall, possibly from a diner or a kitchen. It was one of my favorite photographs in the Cassilhaus Collection, so I knew I wanted to include it in the exhibit and invite an artist to respond to it.

At the same time, I also realized that amidst painting, weaving, writing, drawing, collage, sculpture and various other media, the one medium that was missing from the exhibit was music! Soth's book and photographs have a deep lyrical quality to them, so I knew I wanted to invite a musician to respond to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I actually reached out to Alec Soth to see if he had any musicians he thought would be a good fit for the image; he mentioned a few names, but ultimately we decided instead that we wanted to work with a local musician.

Having known of Kamara Thomas' music and her deep interest in American mythology and the landscape, I reached out to see if she might be up for a rather unlikely request – would she be willing to write an original song in response to this photograph? I was delighted when she agreed. Kamara came over to Cassilhaus one afternoon to sit and spend time looking closely at the photograph and taking notes. Her resulting song, To a Soth Photo, 7 not only beautifully reimagines the narrative of this photograph, but reveals and magnifies the latent sense of longing and nostalgia embedded in it – "old beauty dying in her crown," as Kamara sings. Like the mountain stream in the postcard pinned to the wall in the center of the photograph, Kamara's lyrics and melody become a current, revealing how the ghosts of an imagined past still linger with us today. As Kamara writes, "the past will peel away, you’ll see."