I grew up in the small town of Elkhorn City in eastern Kentucky.  I moved to Lexington when I was fifteen and my life changed.  This was an unsettling time for me.  Although I went home to visit family and friends several times a year, I rarely spent time connecting with the place itself.

    I didn't realize the profound effect the actual physical place had on me until I began studying painting at college.  I began to express my longing for home, and the countryside, through my art.  This was as powerful as my first moments of discovery as a child.

    I took my first photography class during my senior year and responded to it immediately.  At some point I tried shooting some Infrared film.  It was a deeply emotional moment for me.  The dreamy quality of the images made me feel like I was looking at my own memory.

    I knew I had found my way as a photographer to express my feelings about home.  Infrared film allows us to see light rays that fall just outside our visible spectrum.  I think memories are like that, they fall just outside of physical reality.  For me, Infrared connects my inner landscape with the landscape of my childhood.

    I was flooded with images of the mountains, of the places that were vivid to me as a child.  I knew I had a deep need to explore home, that I had been missing a vital part of myself.

    As I began working to re-establish a relationship with my hometown, my understanding of home began to grow.  I realized I am not only from Elkhorn City, I am from Appalachia and that I needed to learn more about it in order to understand more about myself as a person and as an artist.

    Over the past two years I have been fortunate to do this with the help of family, friends, and through various work experiences.  The result has been an intense connection with one particular place, the area in and around Cumberland Gap.  This is where my personal memory connects to the roots of American national memory.  The coming together of this theme has been a major breakthrough for me, one that I am just beginning to explore and understand.

    These images are a sample of those I made during the three months I spent there this past summer.  With the help of the Al Smith Fellowship I received this year from the Kentucky Arts Council, I will be able to spend more than a month in the field and generate 500 new images this year.  I would also like to thank Media Working Group for inviting me to take part in Open Studio:  The Arts Online project funded by the Benton Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  It is very exciting to have this emerging technology as an additional tool to add to my camera bag and darkroom.  And on a personal level, there are many people who have helped me along this journey and I cannot express how much their love and support means to me.
                                                                                                Tracy A. Hawkins