Evening Land

I have been working on this documentary project in one form or another for as long as I have been able to pick up a camera. Initially focused on the South, where I grew up, I have been drawn to subjects that are simultaneously familiar and foreign. I have looked with wonder on an America that has catapulted toward the end of a millenium while clinging for dear life to all its old idiosyncracies.

The title is taken from a line by the great southern writer Walker Percy, with whom I share both North Carolina and New Orleans roots. "It's an interesting age you live in - though I can't say I'm sorry to miss it. But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the evening land. That's us all right. And I can tell you, my young friend, it is evening. It is very late." (The Moviegoer)

Bryce Lankard

Portions of this project have appeared in numerous exhibitions under a variety of titles, from my very first solo exhibition, National Dread, at the Galerie Avant Gout, in New Orleans in March of 1988 to Across County Lines: Contemporary Photography from the Piedmont at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2018.

Kind words have been written from time to time about this work, but perhaps my first review remains my favorite.

By Roger Green in the Times-Picayune: “Bryce Lankard...whose photographs of landscapes and people--mostly taken in the South--underscore many nasty, tawdry, even grotesque, aspects of life in the U.S. of A. Conveying moral outrage that recalls the film ‘Easy Rider’, the artist’s black-and-white and color photos hold up a mirror, confronting the viewer with facts he knows to be true, but attributes to the folly of others, usually at a far remove. Lankard discovers and frames striking images that, beyond documenting mindlessness and excess, often reveal a betrayal of American values.”

Marriage Chapel and Motel, Dillon, SC 1985