I was chosen to participate in the 2022 South Carolina State Parks Artist in Residence Program and was lucky to be placed at Table Rock State Park, which is exactly where I wanted to be (I had no say in that part).
As part of the program I was able to stay in a cabin at the park for a week with no other task than to take photos. I think there’s a real value in a program like this for artists because it allows you the space and time to get to know a place while working in it. The landscape changes daily, often hourly, as the light and weather shift. Being immersed in a place allows you to return to the same place as it changes to best capture what you’re experiencing.
I shot about 1400 photos and made the roughly 7.2 mile hike to the top of Table Rock and back twice during the week. I was only required to give one final print to the SC State Park system at the end of my stay, but I ended up going with two prints, one panoramic image of Table Rock and one triptych made up of three separate double exposures, both of which you can see below.
The pano was chosen because it is a good general representation of Table Rock, the main attraction at the park, and highlights being there in the fall. It’s a popular view recognizable to anyone who’s visited the park.
The triptych was chosen because I thought it gave a different sense of the mountain and tapped into the idea of experiencing multiple parts of the park over time. The left panel is a view of Table Rock. The middle panel is the view from Table Rock, essentially the opposite of the left panel. The right panel shows both the mountain at the top as well as the creek at the very beginning of the trail, representing both the start and finish in one image. And so the triptych represents various aspects of the mountain and the hike to the top all in one overall piece. You can see the finished triptych as well as the three panels individually below.
Additional photos from my stay at the park can be seen scattered throughout my Blue Ridge Mountains gallery.
*click below to see full images, the thumbnails crop some of them
