I started working on this project after a series of events. I was given a large amount of medium format film left over from another photographer Tom Robertson's photo project on Citizens Bank in Fayette, and almost a year later I also acquired a medium format Mamiya camera from Dorris Killingsworth, a longtime Fayette photographer who spent years documenting its people. Wanting to do a project with the film and the camera, this coincided with a Washington Post article on Fayette that examined race, politics, representation, and belonging. Through all that, there was also a Rails to Trails project that would better connect Ward 4 to downtown. The trail and the article on my mind, I grabbed my M645, some film, and started walking, not knowing it would lead to a multi-year photo project I'm still shooting today. For the first time, really seeing a side of Fayette I often didn't travel through.

The images that follow are of that side. Ward 4, a part of Fayette shaped by who the town chose to invest in, and who it didn't. Among the places here is West Highland, once the county's first African American high school, later the Area Vocational Center until it closed in 2000. The building held on through mixed use, including Bevill State, Fayette County High School, and Head Start, before sitting mostly abandoned after around 2014, with an effort now underway to restore it.

Photographs by Scott Gravlee