Alix Deane

This project began in 2019 as a commemoratory. A few years after moving away, I felt a pull to re-learn my relationship toward my home. The land we come from is inextricably linked to our lived experience, our makeup, and our footprint. Home is a space of transformation and articulation; it is a place which holds deep roots. The land that raised me is marked by the French Broad River.

The river is in current day Southern Appalachia; however, its path predates the geological formation of the Appalachian Mountains at large. The French Broad becomes the Tennessee, which converges into the Ohio and the Mississippi, discharging its waters into the World's oceans via the Gulf of Mexico. I am interested in documenting what came before, and what continues to emerge as the climate becomes more extreme.

The river is between 260 and 325 million years old, making it one of the oldest rivers in the world. The first non-native settlers arrived in the region I call home in the late 1700s. They did so for the water. By the 1830s, most of the Cherokee people occupying the land were forced to migrate to Oklahoma via the Train of Tears. Prior to the settlement of white Europeans, the French Broad was called Tah-kee-os-tee, or racing waters.

I go to the river to reflect and to listen. I go to the river to better know the land I call home. I go to her to understand the grief she holds within. I follow the French Broad from her headwaters to her convergence with the Tennessee River to document the history, the culture, and the changes which emerge along her edges. This project documents the river's environment spanning from major industrial and agricultural sites, to glistening river rocks deep within the mountains. Through photographing its vastness, I define the river's intricate and infectious origins.

The sheer heartbreak of watching this region wash away during the storm system of Hurricane Helene (September 2024) reminded me of the inherent pressure I carry to communicate the truth of the climate crisis. This project is made on photographic film – the urgency of the red, and the starkness of the black and white – come together to visualize the alarm going off inside of my head.

My work is an undertaking of writing the story of coming of age in a world saturated with illness; it is my way of reading, writing, and rewriting the human flow. The French Broad River basin, the place I call home, is merely a place to begin the conversation of the Anthropocene, an international truth.