Terra Fondriest
Ozark Life
Feb 1 - Mar 2, 2024
There is a steady cadence to life in the Arkansas Ozarks. The seasons dictate changes in the everyday that become a source of comfort throughout each week and year. The winter winds bring in a sudden flurry of snow as the fire inside warms the house and deer meat cooks on the stove with potatoes from the garden. The first morel mushrooms prepare to surface in spring as the neighbor kids practice for opening youth turkey hunt. The mud puddles swell with early summer rain as the meat chickens arrive at butchering weight and schools get close to letting out for summer.
Ozark Life weaves together the story of my family with the lives of people in our community. It examines our connection to this land and the roots we have on it, which grow deeper with every generation. Rancher Will Norton can point to the earth under his feet and say his granddad’s dad farmed the same soil where he now raises his family and his cattle. My family is the first generation to live here, but it already feels as though the trees around our home know our children’s names.
This project has been a way for me to embrace the slow and quiet beauty that I’ve always been drawn to – those small moments unfolding all around us on any given day. The ever changing light and fleeting scenes of adventure, like the tarantula that crawled across my daughter’s bare foot in the yard, and then through a series of events, planted itself on our neighbor’s head. I’ve come to understand the steady underlying rhythm of life here as the heartbeat of the hills. It’s something a person who calls this place home comes to feel, and Ozark Life is my heart’s attempt at capturing that in photographs.
Terra Fondriest (American, b.1983, she/her/hers) is a documentary photographer born in Illinois and living for the past fifteen years in the Ozarks of rural Arkansas with her husband, their two children and a flock of animals. After receiving her BS in Fish and Wildlife Conservation from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she worked as a wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service, a wrangler for an outfitter in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana and a GIS mapper for the Buffalo National River. Her journey into motherhood inspired the development of her documentary practice. Her photographs of everyday life in the hills slowly evolved into her ongoing long term project Ozark Life. Fondriest’s work has been awarded the Yunghi Grant in 2022, shortlisted for the PhMuseum Women Photographer’s Grant in 2021 and has been published in The Washington Post, The Bitter Southerner, Arkansas Life Magazine, Courrier International and Huck Magazine. She is a member of Women Photograph and does editorial work for clients including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, The Guardian and Silver Dollar City.