Reed Mattison: Where the Grass Actually Is Greener

IN IMAGES

Born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1997 and now living at the foot of the Tetons in Wyoming, American photographer Reed Mattison has published his first monograph with Origini Edizioni. The sequence measures what separates him from his home state and what keeps drawing him back.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Reed Mattison.

To and From opens on a painting of snow-capped mountains hanging in an abandoned trailer home. Mattison came across it while rummaging with his friend Louis through the trailer where Louis’s grandfather had lived, on the family farm in Somerset, in south-central Kentucky. He found the painting quite poignant. “Growing up in a rural place, especially in the South, the media and popular opinion tell us to go somewhere better,” he explains. “That the grass is always greener. I did move away to the majestic and wild Grand Tetons, but still I find myself back in Kentucky looking for myself, where the grass actually is greener.”

On one of his many trips home, a TSA agent at Nashville International Airport looked at his Wyoming ID: “Wyoming? You’re far from home.” “I knew what she meant,” the photographer recalls, “but I couldn’t help but think no, I was so close to home.” Trained in photojournalism, a discipline built on closing the gap, he nonetheless shoots his own people from behind, through foliage, out of focus. “A lot has changed since I’ve been gone and I feel left behind at times. Many of the photographs are distant and from behind because most of this project was catching up with my old home.”

Mattison long favored the intuitive quality of 35mm, then went looking for a change. For the scenes where people gather, he now brings out a 4×5 view camera. “The magnitude of the negative could capture the complexity of the place I was trying to photograph,” he notes. “Kentucky, like many places in the south, is slow. Our vowels, our meals, the seasons all crawl by, and that allowed me to take a slower approach and capture every blade of grass and bead of sweat.”

Nothing here belongs on a postcard. An obelisk surfaces above a cornfield: it marks, in Fairview, the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States during the Civil War. As a child, the photographer read it as the sign that his grandparents’ house was near. “I hate that guy and all he stood for,” he says. He also refuses to treat poverty as spectacle, as he believes reporters and big publications do when they travel south from the cities. “I was not poor and a lot of Kentuckians aren’t,” he insists. “It does plague our most vulnerable populations but will not be solved by exploiting them through photography. The poor and immigrant communities in Kentucky are fighting the good fight and have a powerful voice of their own. I wanted to photograph my experience because that is all I know.”

The book closes on a quotation from Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer who left New York to work his family’s land in Kentucky, taken from his 1970 essay Think Little. “No other author has explained how I feel about my home, the environment, and community like Berry,” Mattison says, and he hopes to follow him back one day: “There is still more juice in the fruit for me to squeeze.” He had long dreamed of publishing a book, unsure whether it would hold poems, a novel or photographs, yet certain he would dedicate it to someone he loved.

That someone is Clay, his brother, whom he hated for years, to the point of violence. “There is a parallel between my relationship with Clay and my relationship with being born in the South,” he observes. “We were taught to be ashamed of ourselves and that the South was bad.”

The two men grew close as the photographer came to see how diverse and progressive his home state had always been. “He forgave me for all I’d done. He is my best friend. I want to make him proud and I hope he is proud of me.”

No one chooses a brother, or a birthplace. Reed Mattison has chosen both.