Brad Curran

Returning to the Rogue Valley with my camera, where I grew up some 20 years ago, I wasn’t sure what I was searching for. Perhaps it was a sense of closure. Maybe reconnection. What I found was something more ambiguous-a quiet, tender nostalgia, both familiar and unsettling. 

Revisiting these mundane places I see them with a dual vision: as they were and as they are now. The photographs in this series exist in the space between those perspectives, where memory and reality overlap. 

It’s a common story, the prodigal son returning home. Yet there’s a reason we keep revisiting it, in art and in life. These explorations of self and place can reveal the profound, evolving relationship between who we were, who we are, the people and spaces that shape us. 

In this series, I seek to honor the messy complexity of “home”. The photographs are not answers but meditations: on what we leave behind, what we carry forward, and what we come to understand only when we return.