Inspired by Louis Armstrong’s 1930’s title track, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South”, Isabelle Baldwin’s photographic project, Sleepy Time Down South embraces the romantic qualities that the passage of time has over memories.
Pulling from childhood experiences, Baldwin has chosen to monumentalize the often quiet existence of a life protected by the mountains. In these silent moments, Spanish moss hangs above a cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, a hive of honey bees overlap one another in the backyard of a cabinet maker’s home in western North Carolina, and the late July sun stains a white church outside of southern Maryland.
Baldwin’s work emphasizes the universal feelings ascribed to a home, including the childlike sensibility to idealize familiar landscapes, landscapes with suffocating humidity and a nightly orchestra of cicadas and crickets, where ladybugs rest by the windowsill at the crux of June, and the snakes, as well as the people, begin to shed their summer skin.
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