THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
In October of 1995, I made my first trip to Corapeake, North Carolina, with my best friend Brenda. Corapeake is a tiny crossroads community just over the North Carolina line from Virginia and the place where Brenda spent the first eight years of her life. We went so that I could make pictures of her aging relatives. That initial trip marked the beginning of a creative journey for me that continues to this day. The people of Corapeake were welcoming and remarkable for their warmth and lack of pretense. Their stories ranged from the simple pleasures of childhood spent living in the rural shadow of the Great Dismal Swamp to remembrances of losses framed by inevitability and hope. These recollections resonated with me, taking me back to stories my white grandfather had told about his experiences growing up in rural North Carolina. The similarities were striking and having lost my grandfather and his stories, I determined that I needed to preserve the stories from Corapeake. So I began recording the remembrances of the people in Corapeake as I continued making pictures. As I amassed more and more photographs and recordings, I started to gather them all together in journals that I would carry with me on each trip. These journals gradually became scrapbooks as I added documents and objects - a fan from church, a cotton boll from the fields, autographs of each person interviewed, funeral programs that used my portraits on their covers - some stories having come to include me as both observer and participant. "Corapeake" is about love and loss and hope and faith. It explores the nature of memory in that it is about what is remembered as much as what is forgotten. These stories are universal in their depiction of a time and experience not limited to the people of Corapeake or to African-Americans or even small towns. I didn’t realize when I started "Corapeake" the profound way in which these people would ultimately affect and enrich my life. It has been both a privilege and a blessing to be allowed into their lives and to become, in a way, part of the story of "Corapeake." - Kendall Messick
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