Haunting, unvarnished structures, drawn from the peripheries of Southern Appalachia, serve as spectral reminders of cultural and collective memory. Exploring the intersection of tourism, religion, and folklore, Tema Stauffer’s photographs document the natural beauty, proliferating decay, and forgotten histories embedded in the landscape. The series title draws inspiration from novelist Charles Baxter’s collection of essays on the craft of fiction, Wonderlands, in which he describes settings that evoke a heightened psychological atmosphere in specific literary works. “Wonderlands are caused by, or are expressive of, emotional instability, estrangement, fantasy, and solitude.”
The ethos of wonderlands in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southeastern Virginia counties is conjured through a delicate attention to its fading ephemera. Roadside attractions, religious symbols, and architectural relics punctuate verdant landscapes, evoking forlorn eras at once eerily still and emotionally charged. Unknown voices call out from derelict clapboards and transient motel rooms, tracing the lives of multitudes passing through to their next destination. Some of these stories rise to the surface, binding the viewer to their significance. We bear witness to the photograph of a solitary house, stitched together with humble timber, recalling the memory of jazz musician Nina Simone, who spent her childhood in Tryon, North Carolina. Erected in the early 20th century and long overlooked, her home was purchased in 2017 by four African American artists and renovated to create a communal space where the public could honor her legacy. Also pictured is the stately yet fragile barn in Madison County, where Appalachian folk musician and Free Will Baptist preacher Lloyd Chandler claimed that a vision from God inspired the legendary folk song “O, Death.” Lyrical refrains seeking mercy and salvation spread throughout impoverished rural communities at the dawn of the past century, igniting feverish prayers in the process. Empty churches whose congregations have dissolved into the tributaries of collective memory sit dilapidated as well. At the same time, the ghosts of bells calling one to worship echo across barren forests and the desolate mountains that frame them.
The quietude of these structures recalls the blood of ancestral lines, the aspirations of the souls they contained, and how their image can arrest our attention, asking us to reflect upon lives unregistered in the national consciousness. These photographs invite us to consider how micro-histories are cast against macro-shifts in the American imaginary, from the ravages of the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny, which ruptured native communities, to the consequences of our current climate crisis and the aftermath of floods and hurricanes that unravel mountainsides, dislodge foundations, and displace thousands. The remnants of these intertwined histories, both micro and macro, are evidence of the fraught narratives of America’s conquest and capitalist enterprises colliding in our present.
The discriminatory doctrines so intrinsic to America’s founding are expressed in iconographic form. A seemingly innocent statue of an Indigenous warrior harbors the all too familiar trope of the “noble savage.” A roadside motel sign flickers with a neon “vacancy” that flashes alight in our consciousness, reminding us that stereotypes are easily consumed as ignorant nostalgia for some and absolute terror for others. The sedimentation of these stereotypes is found alongside backcountry highways and reflects a weighted national history, a burden yearning to be undone. While some of these insignia are erected with pride, like those that appear in the Smoky Mountains on the reservation home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, beseeching tourists to witness the splendor of their land and the majesty of their culture, such representations cannot be separated from the tragedy of slaughter and dispossession that underpin them.
The contours of the American wonderlands pictured here are an entreaty to navigate the polarities of preservation and erasure. What takes root when we rebuild in the aftermath of devastation? What do we want to hold on to as a nation, regions, communities, and individuals? Where do we locate ourselves in these vast psychic-social constellations of buildings and signs that catalyze our emotions, producing estrangement for some and familiar fantasies for others? In reflecting upon the past, we must ask ourselves, what futures can we craft that resolve our collective pain, acknowledge the detritus of physical and ideological facades, and allow us to reunite across the uneven silhouettes of history? Stauffer’s oeuvre prompts us to contemplate the gravity of these questions by mining the infrastructures of disappearing worlds. In this sense, she acts as a semiotician of all that is left unsaid, interlacing aesthetics and empathy with reckonings and revelations.
Focusing her attention on modest structures, Stauffer pays homage to the humility inherent in their construction and the communities they represent. She reveals the ingenuity of tinfoil plates arranged in an altar-like composition, a form of outsider art pictured in architectural form. A house submerged in the wilderness stands unrelenting, despite the vines encircling bare wooden planks that threaten to extinguish it. A derelict marquee in the Southwest Virginia Coalfield region showcases a phone number promising addiction treatment, signaling that both landscapes and lives need repair. In an area ravaged by the opioid epidemic, acute job losses, and where vulnerability was exploited for profit, Americans are forging their own paths out of crisis with meager support. Spanning industrial decay, historical landmarks, and the vernacular of rural working-class outposts, emblems of pride persist despite the environmental devastation, corporate malfeasance, and economic despair that encircle them. A Christmas tree stands proud with decorations, nestled within the hollows of an abandoned church, as if to announce that faith can still reign and hope will endure. Stauffer’s eye thus excavates, collecting divine stories from the whispers of ruins. In this way, she commemorates resilience at the margins, summoning us to pause and consider the impact of those unassuming sites that rest quietly at the edge of our explorations.
Francesca Romeo is currently a postdoctoral fellow within the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her scholarship focuses on civil and human rights, exploring the significance of digital imagery in recovering marginalized histories and designing socially just futures. Her theory-practice approach is informed by degrees in English Literature, Art History, Photography, and Film & Digital Media, drawing upon feminist studies, political theory, and visual studies to explore how cultural memory and resistance to state violence are shaped by emerging technologies.