Pete Candler and I share a deep and abiding love for the South, despite its troubled past and complicated present. The Road to Unforgetting is a nuanced and personal exploration of both, revealed by his words and his imagery to coexist poignantly, and perhaps uniquely, in the South.—Sally Mann

This 160 page hardcover title gathers 175 of Pete Candler’s black-and-white film photographs from road trips across the American South from 1997 to 2022, along with his insightful long form essay on the imaginative potential of the unplanned detour. A meditation on “back-roading” with a film camera as a spiritual exercise, Road documents lesser-known, often unmarked, sites in the history of the South that exist off the main drag of collective memory. A powerful collaboration of word and image in search of deeper truths, Road points towards a more complete understanding of America’s most singular region.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Pete Candler is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, The Bitter Southerner, The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Cultures, The Washington Post, and others. He now lives in Asheville, where he writes about memory and forgetfulness in the American South. His recent publications address the legacy of white supremacy and white amnesia in the South. Pete’s forthcoming title, Prologue to the American South, is being published by USC Press in Fall 2023.

A DEEPER SOUTH is Pete’s ongoing storytelling project about the beauty, mystery, and sorrow of the Southern Road. The vision of A Deeper South is rooted in the idea that the spiritual, political, and cultural health of a nation, region, city, town, or person depends upon an honest and unflinching memory; that the gravest danger to our city and ourselves is a willful amnesia; that hope is to be found through the work of active remembrance, putting back together the fragments of personhood scattered by a culture of selective memory.

9 x 10 inches. 160 pages. Hardcover, smyth-sewn binding. $45.