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DISPARATE PROJECTS
Disparate Projects is an evolving collective and platform dedicated to the exploration of contemporary photography. Founded by Lisa Beard, Micah McCoy, and Vann Thomas Powell, we are committed to thoughtful photographic curation, engaging critical discussions in photographic theory, and nurturing collaborations with photographers of disparate approaches.
SELECTED EXCERPTS
Self-described as “looking like an old Reb,” Shiloh, Tennessee, 2022.
Top Left: Ricky, Robin, and Kennedy, Fredericksburg, Virginia, 2022.
Top Right: Confederate reenactor from Sharpsburg, Maryland, 2021.
Our co-founder, Vann Thomas Powell, reflects on identity, history, and the enduring weight of the Civil War in his deeply personal piece, On Contentious Ground, featured at Southern Cultures Journal.
Through his upbringing in a racially blended family and a lifelong fascination with Civil War sites, Vann examines how history informs our present and shapes the American identity.
Read the piece at here.
...The horizon itself is a construction that we create as an orientation point through a combination of our own constantly changing perceptions along with a setting’s surroundings to create a type of stability. And interestingly, the horizon often plays into Jon’s work. Jon’s practice involves contemplation and reciprocity with the landscape, and there being an unfixed horizon - something forever out of reach and destabilizing - is crucial to many of his photographs. This photo marries form, process, and content while instigating an unraveling, visually and internally. Although formally beautiful as a print (I’m lucky to be able to look at it everyday; it hangs in my living room), this photograph evokes the notion of the Kantian sublime, which refers to an overwhelming experience one may feel when unable to comprehend the vastness or magnitude of a thing. This is related to a different kind of beauty, a philosophical one. Once one moves through the photograph and realizes that up could be down, that the horizon is broken, and that we are neither here nor there, the uncertainty and discomfort related to a loss of footing is replaced by a sort of relief and understanding that transpires when confronting those feelings and a recognizance of a larger sense of being or meaning materializes through self-reflection...
Lisa Beard
Right: Justin Hood by Micah McCoy
This photograph by Justin Hood encapsulates so much of what draws me to photography. When a photograph leaves me cold, I question its necessity—a lamentable position for any creator. A photograph like this one had to exist. I’d venture to guess it lived in the photographer’s memory long before it became a photograph, in the hazy architecture of consciousness.
Of course, a fond memory doesn’t, of its own accord, make a great photograph. The skill of the photographer to translate their inner dialogue into a work that provides the viewer with the same universal tug, Barthes’ punctum maybe, happens through deliberate technical and aesthetic choices.
Here sharpness and the descriptive quality of medium, in direct conflict with the desaturation, create a moment that is both wholly present, yet unlike anything experienced in real time. The result for me is an image that conjures those moments, when something has entered my field of vision, and in an instant, a raw memory is brought to mind, taking my breath away. The translation of universal feeling will always be a primary objective in the photographs I take and of greatest value in the photographs I treasure—the work of my best friends and my guideposts.
Micah McCoy
Read long form pieces by the Disparate Projects writers and friends of the publication on our Substack.
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