My thesis focuses on photographing communal spaces throughout North Carolina. Uninhabited most of the time and not overtly commercial in use, these sites remain predominantly unaccounted for by domestic or market-driven considerations, yet make up a significant part of the region. It is the relational-experiential places that I am initially curious to photograph. Often structured in counter-distinction to dominant cultural trends, these communal spaces exist, historically, as sites of exception. By photographing these sites, I hope to introduce questions that explore impulses evidenced in these structures. What is it to gather? What is it to participate in, to form and reform communities? A site also, the photograph offers a means of alternative inquiry and – in considering its own constrained frame – the potential for dialogue into the limits by which sites are sustained. It is often by way of the slant, suggestive evidence of the photograph that intricacies of cultural signification may begin to be seen.