Hamilton Young Ward

Summer Headstones is an ongoing film/photographic project which explores the urban decay of municipal swimming pools in the Southern United States, due to their closure and abandonment by white officials after desegregation was instituted in America.

Forced into allowing African American families into these public pools, officials chose instead to not allow anyone to swim in the hot summer months. Seeing no other alternative, they simply closed the doors and drained the water.

These pools were then either paved over, buried and forgotten or they were left to rot in the southern sun, the vegetation taking over and serving as stark reminders of the race relations in the Southern United States.

My hope through this project is that by showcasing these lost monuments to racism, through film, that real conversations about race relations can be had.

The frightening thing is that while these pools were closed near desegregation, this issue is still relevant today, with private pools closing down instead of opening the doors to lower income families.

UNreality is a photographic project which takes screenshots in video games and then uses photographic darkroom techniques to print them. The hope with this current project is to create a push and pull in the viewer where the landscape looks realistic but the viewer knows that it's not. 

As gamers we spend so much time in these worlds that they become real to us and that's what I want to get across. This idea of the virtual world being the real one, the "unreality" of it all.

By using hand processing in the dark room for these digital images, I'm bringing the image into our physical reality, I'm making it real. 

The two processes that I'm using are lith printing (the black and white ones) and another process known as inkjet cyanotype. I'm a big fan of juxtaposing older photographic techniques with digital technology.