In a smaller city like Greenville, SC, the signs of global pandemic are more minimal. There aren’t trucks loaded with bodies nor are there truly over-extended local medical systems. There is an intellectual knowledge of the severity of what is happening that is disparate from an experiential knowledge of the crisis that seems pervasive in my area. It all feels quite normal on the surface but just a bit off, like realizing you're in a dream because a detail or two are wrong. The photographs in You Can’t Go Home Again are meant to speak to how the size and location of where I live play into the local perspective towards the crisis.

The subjects exist each as their own range of intellectual knowledge and individual reactions to the pandemic. Some individuals almost seem lost in that dream while others seem to carry the weight of this intellectual knowledge quite heavily. I wanted a sense of intimacy simultaneously to exist with a sense of loneliness. This seeming dichotomy is what prompted me to only photograph individuals which speaks more to the isolation that is inherent during this pandemic regardless of a person’s living arrangements. This was an important and deliberate distinction for me in this body of work.

The desire for intimacy despite the distance and barriers in most images led me to photograph those closest to me in my community. Each image is simply titled with that person’s first name to further enhance the familiarity for the viewer. The project is both about my personal experience as projected through the portraits of my community but also the shared experience of self-isolation we are experiencing collectively as a society.

The title of the series is from a novel of the same name by Thomas Wolfe. The novel has applicable themes of loss, nostalgia, and otherness, but it also makes the viewer consider the idea of home and whether it exists as a physical place, a community, a single person, or something else entirely. Home, for me, is a sense of safety and love.
This pandemic is quite unique in comparison to other collective catastrophes of nature or man. Wars make refugees of innocent bystanders. They become strangers in a strange land. Similarly, natural disasters cause severe and observable carnage displacing individuals from their homes and even homelands.

During the Coronavirus pandemic, our homes have become both places of refuge but also cages of isolation. We are in our most familiar spaces, but we occupy them in a manner that is foreign. All the while the world is radically shifting in such a way that when we return to our lives outside of our homes, it will more than likely be an unfamiliar world in many regards. I wanted to address how this global pandemic is shifting our experience of home in the literal and figurative sense.

This passage from Wolfe’s work summons up some of the feelings I want to capture through my portraits in this series. "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." The loss of a sense of place as well as the tumultuous shifts on a global scale experienced by the protagonist George Webber during his travels both at home and abroad felt relatable to the current struggles people are experiencing during this global pandemic.

Departing from the majority of my work which involves the use of strobes and constant lights regularly, this entire series was photographed with only natural light. The reason for this was twofold. I wanted there to be an inherent conflict between the uncontrollable nature of natural light with my desire to control the scene and, on a personal level, regain some sense of control over my world. This mirrors the struggle we face collectively in the face of this virus that is a force of nature we are struggling to gain some semblance of control over. The second reason was that the specificity of natural light at dawn and dusk helped me make photographs that have a heightened sense of a fleeting and specific moment evoking the surrealism that embodies our current reality.

The ephemeral light of the series is juxtaposed heavily against deliberate compositions that control the structure of the rest of the scene. The tight control over the edges of the frames allows for this sense of restriction to be captured without the use of obvious physical barriers in various photographs within the series. As the series developed, I realized the photographs needed to be a bit too composed and controlled to tell my desired narrative. In this small town, we are trapped within our safe spaces while the world looks much the same outside, and like most bad dreams that start out beautifully, the monster will show up eventually, even if you can’t see it right now.

Will Crooks is a transplant to the South via the Midwest. He works primarily in the editorial space with a focus on narrative driven portraiture. For Will, the process of making portraits whether a snapshot of friends and family or an editorial assignment on location is endlessly fascinating. The mix of technical skill, empathy, and focus needed to create iconic yet nuanced portraits keep his finger on the shutter button every day.

The dichotomy of feeling otherness and familiarity to the South drives his work. This enigmatic identity and his relationship to the South informs the direction and focus of his photograph making process. Whether collecting rare and strange birds through street portraits of strangers or redefining a familiar place to one with cinematic romanticism, he works to recontextualize reality and separate it through the use of light and mood.

Will Crooks: You Can't Go Home Again