End of the Road (2020-2022)
What makes End of the Road so revelatory amongst Souders’ wider body of work is its desire to occupy the in-between. Every textured black and white scene oscillates between fact and fiction, danger and security, the strange and the familiar. Whether it speaks to our collective consciousness or something more personal to Souders herself, the work powerfully collides the menacing and the mundane. -Gem Fletcher, British Journal of Photography
Brea Souders began making the photographs that comprise End of the Road while living in rural upstate New York. The black-and-white photographs capture candid glimpses of visitors walking to the cul-de-sac at the end of a gravel road viewed through the mesh of a window screen or through curtains of leaves and branches. The passage of time unfolds in these photographs through seasonal changes and through the perambulations of Souders’s subjects. Some visitors return to the End of the Road repeatedly, while others make a momentary, but singular, impression. Each photograph is a chance encounter that sparks curiosity about the subject, what brought them to the End of the Road, and where they will go from here.
-Beth Saunders, Curator, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery at University of Maryland
Exhibition: University of Maryland Library Gallery, in collaboration with poet Lia Purpura