Devin Lunsford

When We Break, How We Shine is a series of landscape photographs made throughout my home state of Alabama between March 2020 and September 2022. Shot during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, this project was created out of necessity as a therapeutic exercise in witnessing and exists within a photographic grey area between documentary, introspection, and metaphor. The pandemic presented challenges and opportunities for me to capture the beauty and complexity of the region. With travel restrictions and social distancing measures in place, I began exploring my local surroundings more intimately and reimagining familiar landscapes in a new light. The absence of crowds and human activity allowed for a deeper connection to the environment, and my photographs aim to convey this sense of quietude and introspection.  A sense of stillness, and trauma is exhibited within the landscape as if it exists in a post-raptured state while a spirit of resilience shimmers through in the striking colors, the interplay of light and shadow, and the enduring grace of the natural world. These elements engage in conversation to deepen the complexities, contradictions, and beauties of a fluctuating landscape

Devin Lunsford is a fine art and documentary photographer currently based in Alabama. His work utilizes photography to interrogate the American South, drawing connections between its complexities, contradictions, and beauties while focusing on the nature of time, place, and memory. His photography has been exhibited internationally including recent shows at The Front (New Orleans, LA), ClampArt Gallery (New York, NY), The Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL), Candela Books + Gallery (Richmond, Va.), Onomato Verlag (Düsseldorf, Germany), Birmingham Museum of Art SHIFT space (Birmingham, Al), Slow Exposures (Concord, Ga) and Photographic Nights of Selma (Selma, AL) and has been published in such outlets as The New Yorker, The New York Times, PDN, The Oxford American, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, AINT-BAD and Fisheye Magazine.

In 2019 he was included as one of PDN’s 30 new and emerging photographers and was announced as a winner of the Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Award in 2021. In 2023 he was the recipient of the Gay Burke Memorial Photography Fellowship by the Alabama State Council on the Arts. In 2020 he released his first monograph "All the Place You've Got" which explores notions of beauty, anxiety, and the passage of time while documenting the changing landscape along Alabama’s Corridor X. He currently resides in Alabama with his wife Katie and daughter Eden.