Greg
Banks

Don't Do in the Dark What You Don't Want Brought Out in the Light

The Appalachian hills hold my deep-rooted memories. They witness my presence, and they breathe traces of enchantment.
The self-portraits repeat like dreams I can't quite wake from, but with the harsh reality of the region I was born in. They dwell in the threshold between the visible and the felt, tracing the contours of a psyche that is connected to something older and more powerful than memory. These personal images are not simply documents of place, but conversations: a reckoning with the history I inherited, and the memories I need to release. Appalachia becomes a living, breathing mythology, offering it's soil for these stories to unfold. The land remembers even what I try to forget. This is place where isolation becomes not just geography but my identity.
The palladium prints, with their earthy tones, emulate the rust and soil of Appalachia, weighted with remembrance. The title becomes a metaphor for photography itself, an alchemy that turns darkness into light, coaxing buried stories and interior truths into what is inevitably revealed.
In the end, this series is an act of returning, not just to a place or an earlier self, but to a deeper understanding of who I am as an Appalachian, reclaiming the terrain from the inside rather than accepting the definitions imposed from the outside. I've come to see that the self is never fixed, but shaped and reshaped by the mountains that once held me and continue to shape me still.