Good River
I recently had a conversation with photographer Josh Chaney, about his recent project around the Ohio River Valley;
“My working title for this project is Good River. The Seneca originally named the Ohio River Ohi:yo', which has a literal translation of Good River. The Ohio River Valley includes portions of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. I'm choosing to focus just on Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia (a bit of Kentucky too) as this is the region of the Ohio River Valley I've grown up living and photographing in. I started this archival project as an offshoot of my project Sassafras Ridge, which explores my personal relationship and understanding of Appalachian Ohio. That region is part of the Ohio River Valley, and I started to grow an interest in the Ohio River Valley at large over time. I think of Good River as constructing a historical narrative/mythology about the region's past, whereas Sassafras Ridge is me constructing my personal history/mythology/connection to the region in the present day. I view the two projects as being in dialogue with one another, where the historical mythology of the region had to exist as a foundation before my personal mythology of the region could be formed in my childhood.
For Good River specifically, I'm using USGS and Library of Congress photo archives to construct the historical mythology of the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania portion of the Ohio River Valley. When I think of this thing I'm trying to construct, I think of a landscape of brutal masculinity, land use and natural resource extraction, hard work, and also ideas of pride (in region and in career type) and family and natural beauty. I guess I just really am trying to show a sort of simultaneous brutality and beauty of the region. This duality is also present in my Sassafras Ridge project, where the legacy of land degradation via coal and industry is contrasted with foothills and forests that taught me how to love the world and where I'm at and how to be loving and hard working as a man.” — Josh Chaney
