This photo, taken from behind glass in a drizzling rain from the railroad tracks behind a factory in Burlington, NC captures a blurry image of two workers standing in a wet, muddy brown lot between a flat front brick building and a ramshackle eggshell-colored aluminum shed. In the background two tall grey cylindrical industrial vats or containers stand with a kind of scaffolding connecting them at their tops and another piece of scaffolding hanging diagonally between the ground and somewhere behind the red brick building. Other pieces of factory equipment of unknown purpose are situated next to the workers, including what appears to be a dark mesh basket with white material inside and a hose protruding from it toward the workers. The photo resembles a painting in the way the bodies and faces of the workers are blurred and faded, as if deteriorating into their surroundings.
This was photographed from a moving car in the paper mill town of Canton in the North Carolina mountains. The image is that of an off-white aluminum trailer home liberally speckled with black mold and mildew stains. The trailer sits on cinderblocks with no signs of life in or around it, the tops of green trees behind it. Two glass panel doors several feet above the green weeds and grey gravel below are darkened except for sunlight entering from a small window on the other side of the trailer. Reflected in the glass door panes is the ghostly image of the grey 2010s-model sedan from which the photo was taken.
Hotel Seen from Tunnel Road Homeless Camp, Asheville, NC This photo was taken from the site of a homeless encampment on the side of a mountain in the North Carolina tourist town of Asheville. A bright, almost glowing hotel, three yellow buildings with burgundy roofs, is illuminated by a late autumn sunset. Over the mountaintop behind the hotel and surrounding it a blur of dense fall foliage in orange, brown and green is visible. Below it, in a darkened shadow, is a distant dark grey parking lot thickly packed with automobiles, visible in a distant blur. Closer to the photographer, an empty blue-grey parking lot sits on a slope below the encampment. Mostly barren dark grey saplings growing immediately in front of the encampment jut into the image between the photographer and the rest of the scene, forming a kind of frame.
In this photo, also taken through the window of a moving car, a slope of green grassland patchy with brown and beige bald patches sits empty, the blurry tops of green trees on the ridge behind it. Below the field is a brown and white “backhoe” with its digging arm and claw extended in a downward angle and a white pickup truck in front of it, an orange plastic mesh construction fence below these. All of that takes up only about a sixth of the photo. Most of it depicts the blue sky above the field featuring a large wispy cloud in the shape of the number 7, so large it dwarfs everything else in the image. The angle of the 7-shaped cloud and the angle of the backhoe arm appear to form a complimentary or contrasting juxtaposition.
North Headquarters Drive Mural on Abandoned Service Station, Greensboro, NC
In 2018 this mural covered a garage door on a long-closed service station near the North Carolina A&T campus in an area of East Greensboro where many auto repair shops and factories now stand abandoned. A painting of a cartoonish blue-eyed, blond haired female head and face with yellow-orange hair glances sidelong with a pair of red, black-lensed sunglasses being lowered before the eyes. The face is closely framed on all sides by a garish green background with the words “What’s Your Sign” written in large yellow letters across the door’s top three panels, above the face. The ghoulishness of door and mural is amplified by signs of entropy on and around it, including a large hole in the face image and brown vines growing between the paint-chipped panels. A long, decaying grey and brown board nailed across the panels at the very bottom of the door, cuts off most of the lips and all of the chin of the face image. A swath of dirty snow and wet black asphalt is visible below the door.
Charles Corriher, fifty-two, is an SSI recipient living in Greensboro, NC. He grew up and later attended college in Asheville, NC. He has been a volunteer worker at Weatherspoon Art Museum for the last eight years. The photographer was diagnosed ASD (neurodivergent) by UNC TEACCH more than a decade ago.
