2 months. 5 counties. 10 towns. 

In What Remains, a journey tracing my ancestral roots woven through railroad tracks and cypress trees of the upper Pee Dee and Lumber Rivers, what I found was unexpected. For the first time, I was truly faced with what these communities had become. Clarity. A shift in perspective. It brought me face to face with the reality of surroundings to which I had become desensitized over the past twenty-two years.

On multiple occasions, I was stopped by middle-aged men who asked me if I was going to open back up their favorite places. It did not hit me until an encounter with a group of men in an unairconditioned laundromat in 100-degree weather. While their clothes washed, during what should've been dinner time on a Saturday evening, the weight of their words left me speechless: 

"Oh, I saw a camera and thought you were going to bring us some jobs to the area." 

When is enough going to be enough? Turning basic human rights into political agendas, letting the rich get richer while poverty prevails. These photographs shed light on the growing systemic inequality, a widening gap in the southeastern region of North Carolina, and reflect the lasting impact of the dismantling of the railroad and the closure of factories to move labor overseas, in the hope that more attention will one day bring revitalization.