Homesweet, Homeland “Sometimes I think the whole of my life has been a search to find the one place I truly belong.” Eunice Waymon, aka Nina Simone. Born 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, USA. We should be together.

“Humans are wired for social connection. Without social ties, distress emerges and health fails. In this sense, social connection seems to be a biological imperative. Social ties and their impact on health habits, at any particular life stage, cascade into the future by shaping trajectories of change and turning points (in social ties) over time.“
— Debra Umberson, Robert Crosnoe and Corinne Reczek Department of Sociology, Population Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA.

Those necessary social ties are embedded in the home, family, neighborhood and community, and in our society, culture and homelands. As a result, they help define both personal and social identity. Simply put, to survive and thrive in peace, we mortals need each other. I grew up during the Cold War largely in a Midwestern American industrial city of strong heartland values that had been forged over time by sons and daughters of Northern European immigrants. Throughout my youth, home for me, like many of my generation, meant the Mickey Mouse Club on a black and white TV, Little League baseball, late-night WLS radio from Chicago, an after-school paper route and early-morning altar boy duties before classes. I saluted the flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance daily after Mass. I revered President John F. Kennedy because he had blocked Russian missiles in Cuba from attacking us. I was a good American kid, shielded at home by the privileges of race and the entitlements of birth. Then during my adolescence, seeking a better life for our family, my father moved us to a small town in the South, where I was exposed to, but never suffered from, the ugly stain of Jim Crow. The mirage of America from the perspective of my home below the Mason-Dixon line began to fade, to decompose and rearrange phoenix-like into sharply-defined black and white images from Selma, Saigon, Birmingham and Watts. But still, despite that personal tectonic shift, the fundamental ideas of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’, for many like myself, persevered. But what if they didn’t? And what if they don’t? What if, in the America of today, your ‘home’ lies outside the expanse of your ‘homeland’? What if you are a migrant? A displaced person? A refugee? An ‘other’? What if the hallowed “WE” of ‘We the people…’ (see: US Constitution) was never really meant to include you because of the color of your skin or your place of origin. If that’s the case, what are the societal implications for those notions and the tangential concepts of belonging, of personal and national identity and most importantly, of the perception of community, one with shared values? After more than 30 years living outside the US, I returned in 2017 to photograph for a month in Wilson, North Carolina, USA. Subsequent visits during the next four years gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in the spirit of the city and its various traditions, and to visually investigate the daily life of all Wilsonians, both long-standing residents and recent arrivals. By doing so, I wanted to create a narrative of where exactly America, my homeland, after all these years, is, during these tumultuous days. To see if those social ties, so crucial for our rapport, can and do exist. Comprised of 50 color prints and 16 tintype portraits with accompanying interviews, Homesweet, Homeland is a personal experiment in the particular (Wilson, North Carolina) to deduce the larger (America) and to thereby determine if the promise of my homeland’s essential diversity is being realized or thwarted. The project focuses on a region burdened by the baggage of tradition, the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few, but one that carries the hope and potential to forge a new, more inclusive community out of the manifold Souths of today.