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Return to Florida, All in My Background: Piece
Return to Florida, All in My Background: Piece
© Jim Roche/Artist

Return to Florida, All in My Background: Piece

Artist (Born in Jackson County, Florida, 1943)
Date1973–1974
MediumInstallation of eight pairs of gelatin silver prints and graphite works on paper
DimensionsEach panel: 21 × 17 × 1 3/4 inches (53.34 × 43.18 × 4.45 cm)
Each set: 21 × 34 × 1 3/4 inches (53.34 × 86.36 × 4.45 cm)
ClassificationsMixed Media
Credit LineMuseum purchase and partial gift of Ken Rollins, President, Rollins Fine Art
Object number2016.19.1
Collections
  • PHOTOGRAPHY
  • MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
  • WORKS ON PAPER
Label TextA fifth-generation Floridian with Creek Indian ancestry, Jim Roche grew up near Tallahassee, but later left the state for several years. He returned in the early 1970s and began to document Florida’s changing ecology through image-text narratives. For his Return to Florida series, he photographed walking sticks he found while exploring northern Florida’s rural landscapes. He combined these photographs with poetic, diary-like texts that record the date and time of each encounter. Roche thought of the sticks as “antennae” that received and broadcasted the fluctuating waterways, forests, and marshes of Florida. He stated: “What the series had me doing was walking through, putting myself in positions there in nature, photographing it, trying to write down my feelings of what I felt the photograph, the place, was about.” The seven images and accompanying writings in Return to Florida capture Roche’s deep connection to the state’s landscape, and provide a record of how it changed over the course of the artist’s life.