A couple years after moving to the US, in the fall and winter of 1991, I took on a journey in a camper and into the Deep South. It was a trip that would continue with two other long travels in the South and beyond in the following years. It was inspired by a book I read while still living in Belgium:  Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon who wrote about his travels through rural America in a camper van.
A specific time in American history was of particular interest to me: the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal (the WPA and The Tennessee Valley Authority) and the works by photographer Walker Evans.
An economic recession swept through the US in the fall of 1991 and soldiers were returning from the Gulf War.

Southern Ways, the first series in The Southern Trilogy Project, contains the bulk of photographs from this initial trip in 1991. This body of work looks into the rural South’s old ways and conditions of past time that still lingered in the rural towns or cities.

The second and largest body of work, Riverworks, examines the TVA projects and its power facilities and hydro dams in the Tennessee River Valley and other watersheds and regions beyond the South. There is an underlying theme of environmental concern and critique present in this work that paints a glimpse of the South’s (and US’) nuclear legacy. Although the series commenced on the first journey, the bulk of photographs were shot during the second trip of 1993 and continued until the end of the 1990’s.
In 1995, Riverworks, then still an ongoing body of work, won First Prize in The Project Competition (Santa Fe Center For Visual Arts).

Untitled Cities, the third part, was mostly shot during the third journey (1995/96) when I traveled more through the cities of the South. I noticed that they all seemed very similar, at times quite empty and strangely quiet, consisting of the same borrowed fragments of large open spaces and parking lots, office towers and a downtown void of people.

As a sort of epilogue, Men of Appalachia is a series of portraits of iconic men I encountered on my travels in the Tennessee Valley region in 1993.