“Pete Candler and I share a deep and abiding love for the South, despite its troubled past and complicated present. The Road to Unforgetting is a nuanced and personal exploration of both, revealed by his words and his imagery to coexist poignantly, and perhaps uniquely, in the South.”
—SALLY MANN
The Road to Unforgetting gathers 175 of Pete Candler’s black-and-white film photographs from road trips across the American South from 1997 to 2022, along with his insightful essay on the imaginative potential of the unplanned detour. A meditation on “back-roading” with a film camera as a spiritual exercise, Road documents lesser-known, often unmarked, sites in the history of the South that exist off the main drag of collective memory. A powerful collaboration of word and image in search of deeper truths, Road points towards a more complete understanding of America’s most singular region.
“As a deliberate condemnation of the sterility and cultural void of interstate travel, Pete Candler, with camera in-hand, set out to explore the back roads of the rural and small-town South. The result, a quarter-century later, is this engrossing visual compendium of what he saw, harrowing and humorous, heartfelt and humanized. A unique testament to the power of the past to render itself in both fleeting and deeply embedded form.”
—JOHN C. INSCOE
University of Georgia
“The Road to Unforgetting captures the region’s iconic buildings and landscapes with special power. Pete Candler’s eloquent introduction and beautiful photographs track his pilgrimage along less traveled southern streets and roads from 1997 to 2022. Candler cites how the W.P.A. Guides to southern states and The Green Book reveal the jagged, painful racial divide enforced on Black and white travelers in the past. His photographs stand before us like spiritual signposts that animate roads, people, and buildings for the traveler.”
—WILLIAM FERRIS
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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978 Broad St, Augusta, GA 30901
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208 Haralson Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30307
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other publications
A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming 2024)
The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South 1997-2022 (Durham, NC: Horse and Buggy Press, 2022)
Almost Home, Los Angeles Review of Books (3 December 2020).
It Was A Place of Infamy, Southern Cultures (24 September 2020).
Confederate Delusions, in The Christian Century (1 January 2020).
Monuments to Lies, on Flannery O’Connor v. the Lost Cause, for The Christian Century (15 May 2019)
A Deeper South, Los Angeles Review of Books (10 March 2019)
The Two Jameses, The Bitter Southerner (14 June 2018)
Lynched but not Forgotten, on the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, for The Christian Century (4 June 2018)
The Unforgotten: On Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, for The Millions (14 March 2018)
I wish I had the courage to ask my dad about his service in Vietnam, for Veterans’ Day 2017, for The Washington Post (10 November 2017)
How an ancient African saint helped me make sense of 9/11, on teaching St. Augustine’s City of God on the morning of September 11, 2001, for The Washington Post (11 September 2017)
The Punishment Pass, on the use of the Confederate flag in Quebec and Vermont–and Charlottesville, for The Bitter Southerner (17 August 2017)
I’d Like to Thank the Staff for Inviting Myself to Open Mic, for the Brevity Magazine blog (10 July 2017)
Tangled Up in Bob, on the uniquely American voice of Bob Dylan, for Commonweal (2 June 2017)
Hi! You are About to be Rejected from our Quarterly, on a strange pre-rejection notice for the Brevity Magazineblog (5 April 2017)
How a Nation Lost its Mind, a review essay on Nicholas O’Shaughnessy’s Selling Hitler for Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2016)
The Tree of Life and the Lamb of God, on Terrence Malick for The Other Journal (July 2011)
Johnny of the Cross, a eulogy for Johnny Cash for First Things (December 2003)
“A quintessential storyteller, in the great Southern tradition of which he describes, but a storyteller of magnificent largesse of spirit: one whose heart is so large that you feel he has forgiven us for pain we don’t remember inflicting, and pain we don’t recall enduring, in both a cultural and personal sense. I don’t know why that is. I only know that his large heart beats through every sentence, but his intelligence and elegant facility with language underscores his writing in a way that your mind can unhinge itself from some very rusty entrenched patterns and grievances.”
—ROSANNE CASH
“An important voice in the discussion of Southern culture and history.”
—MICHAEL W. TWITTY
bio
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Pete Candler is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, The Bitter Southerner, The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Cultures, The Washington Post, and others. He now lives in Asheville, where he writes about memory and forgetfulness in the American South. His recent publications address the legacy of white supremacy and white amnesia in the South. His new photography collection, THE ROAD TO UNFORGETTING (Horse & Buggy Press), is available now, and his non-fiction narrative, A DEEPER SOUTH (University of South Carolina), will be published in May 2024.
a deeper south
A DEEPER SOUTH is Pete’s ongoing storytelling project about the beauty, mystery, and sorrow of the Southern Road.
The vision of ADS is rooted in the idea that the spiritual, political, and cultural health of a nation, region, city, town, or person depends upon an honest and unflinching memory; that the gravest danger to our city and ourselves is a willful amnesia; that hope is to be found through the work of active remembrance, putting back together the fragments of personhood scattered by a culture of selective memory.
Please visit adeepersouth.com
Find more of Pete’s work on YouTube.
press
“The Gravitas of the South: A Conversation with Pete Candler” (with Tom Zoellner) Los Angeles Review of Books (28 April 2023)
“Dr. Pete Candler Lectures in Earnhardt Speaker Series” Pfeiffer News (28 April 2023)
“The Reckoning In Pictures: Local Photographer Releases The Road To Unforgetting” Asheville Made (November 2022)
“Intersections of Memory and Amnesia In ‘A Deeper South’” on Scenic Roots, WUTC Chattanooga (10 August 2021)
“Flying Carpet Theatre’s Latest Podcast Explores The Power Of Family History” with Adam Koplan on City Lights with Lois Reitzes, WABE Atlanta (29 June 2020).
“Framing the South” by Angie Toole Thompson, TOWN Magazine (28 January 2020).