A Small Town Grows Up
Greg Smith | Bluffton, SC, United States
Organization: imediaSmith
Photographer: Greg Smith
Organization: imediaSmith
Exhibit Title: A Small Town Grows Up
Location: Bluffton, SC, United States
For some 30 years, I found myself living on the May River, a tidal estuary in Bluffton, SC. When I arrived in 1980, the town comprised a single square mile and fewer than 1,000 residents. I left, married, and returned with children in 1985, just as changes there accelerated. Now the town is more than 60 square miles and some 30,000 people, many in new, gated communities.
As we reared our children, I documented our river, town, neighbors and change. A local bank hired me to make calendars from 1991 through 1995. Over the years, between that project, other assignments and personal effort, this added up to more than 1,000 rolls of film. I realized slowly I was building a book.
Now, decamped from the Lowcountry to Colorado’s High Country, I am finally scanning and compiling this work. I sell some pictures as wall art. Some hang in local libraries and offices, even a museum. But I want to build them into a narrative book, a time capsule of what was Bluffton and how it grew up, especially during the 1990s.
I grew up in the suburbs near Washington, albeit on a dead-end street, atop a long hill with tall oaks and hickories, almost bucolic, with a woods and creek nearby to explore.
But small towns drew me: first Athens, OH, for college, then a job in Bartlesville, OK, and a second in Dodge City, KS. My parents retired to Bluffton, and my father was quickly diagnosed. I went to help and left after he died. As the local Gullah might say, “I got da marsh mud stuck ‘tween ma toes.”
I returned and stayed another 27 years, compelled by the river and its wildlife to explore and make pictures, noting and photographing the complicated but somehow simple community that seemed barely changed since the Civil War freed half its members.
These pictures, most made during and around a decade of change that was the 1990s – when the community was still recognizable – represent the largest part of my life’s work. When I got the chance to complete my master’s degree, begun a quarter century earlier, it was natural my thesis (linked below) featured the river. And it’s natural now that I share the lost place I documented.
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