Kurney Ramsey Photography

Projects

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The Other Life

I'm fascinated by the light that surrounds us. I explore the familiar scenes from my life, the places I have called home, the places I spend time with friends, the darkened roads I take home at night. My ordinary life transformed by color and light.

Many of the forgotten places in my life have returned in glimpses of light.

Returning

My family has lived in the same area of eastern North Carolina in a small farming community for over 200 years and land has been passed down through the generations. My father owns a farm that was sold to him by my mother’s father which my grandfather had bought from my great-grandfather and one day it will pass on to my sister and I. My father built a home on this land in 1960 and lived there until 2008. This was the house I grew up in. My father’s mother lived in a house that was over 100 years old and was at one point used as a country school. In it she raised six children including my father. My father once asked where he was born and she pointed across her living room and said “right there”.

I began the project in my grandma’s kitchen, remembering the lasagna she made in the same toaster oven when I was a kid, the same freezer the frozen pizzas were in. I asked her permission to take photos around the house, she agreed but didn’t know what I would take photos of saying I’d probably just find junk. She enjoyed our time together and she would always ask if I thought I got something good and I’d say I thought I had. We’d sometimes talk about living alone and what it’s like to get older. During this time my grandma suddenly got sick, I lost her less than a couple months later which made it very difficult to continue.

A couple months after she died I went into her bedroom for the first time in my life, I had only caught glimpses of it when I was younger. It was awkward to be in her space but I knew things were about to change so I wanted to capture what I could, her special possessions, her faded reminders of the important times in her past.
My family agreed to let my cousin remodel my grandma’s home and eventually move in, it’s good to see the house stay in the family but it’s sad to see the reminders of her fade away, all the wallpaper and makeshift repairs that made it hers undone.

I have photographed these homes and this land over the course of two years, through the light of winter, spring, summer and fall. I believe I will continue to photograph these places for the rest of my life, revisiting the deep memories of my past from time to time for in these places I feel a connection I feel nowhere else.