Bethany Souza
Bethany Souza is a Floridian expatriate currently living in Hammond, Louisiana.
She received a B.A. for the University of South Florida in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia
College Chicago. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at
Southeastern Louisiana University.
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Artist Statement:
My current body of work, Sunshine State, is a documentary series investigating the
visual and cultural complexity of west central Florida.
My family relocated to Florida when I was eleven. At that age, the prospect of
leaving my friends behind to move to a place where it doesn't snow was difficult to
comprehend. While I had always enjoyed family vacations in Florida, I found it difficult to
understand that this was a place people actually lived.
I lived there for twenty years, and it never felt like home until I left.
After relocating to the Midwest, in 2004, I began to long for a place I never even
knew I liked. On trips home I revisited the places I had first explored on vacations as a
child, beach motels and shuffleboard clubs, shops that sell nothing but juice and
marmalade. Many of these once familiar places have seen better days, and seem empty
and sad though my memories of them are quite the opposite. These images of tourist sites
are complimented by views of private residential spaces, the ordinary surroundings of
normal, everyday Florida. My intent is that these images work together to represent the
unique dichotomy, between home and away, that exists in the region.
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