Lamont Collins, founder of Roots 101 African American Museum, t is holding a slave collar, one of the most horrific devices I’ve ever seen. Slave collars were locked around enslaved peoples necks to keep them from escaping. The weight of the collar and the protrusions, in this case spikes, impeded any sort of movement. Lamont founded Roots 101 to tell “the other half of the story,” the African American experience that has been forgotten or ignored.

Having studied photography, pictures like these orbit my mind on a constant loop whether I am conscious of them or not, reminding me of the power of photography and the significance of the past. On the days when I am presumed a DEA agent, these are the apparitions that coax me onward.

At 351 feet, it towers over the Todd County landscape, the fifth tallest monument in the United States. Driving west on US 68 from Elkton, it immediately comes into view: the Jefferson Davis Monument, sited in the small town of Fairview, Davis’s birthplace.

I’d just spent a wonderful weekend with Pine Mountain Collective, and informal group of artists convened by the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust (KNLT). The KNLT has the vision of purchasing all of the available lands on Pine Mountain and putting them in nature preserves. Pine Mountain is Kentucky’s only true ridge mountain, running 113 miles plus from Tennessee to West Virginia. It’s a unique biosphere with a number of endangered species unique to Pine Mountain.

I went fishing one night for Asian Carp with Ronnie Hopkins near Kentucky Lake Dam. When I called him to set things up and asked him how he was, he answered “not fit to kill” (meaning not worth the price of the bullet it would take to kill him as he later explained to me). […]

Perhaps the best way to describe my thoughts about the “new” Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project is to tell a few stories from my journey so far that illustrate some of the things I’m interested in covering.

On my first day of work everyone in Sawyer thought I was a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent. As a photographer I have had the law called on me countless times – but never before have I been presumed to be the law. I was pretty mystified, and more than a little amused.