ENTRY DESCRIPTION
This image is part of a larger project entitled "Southold Township." Southold is an isolated town on the east end of Long Island. A rural waterfront hamlet of illustrious natural beauty, cultural isolation, and national tradition, Southold both emancipates its residents from larger American commercial changes, yet traps its residents in its American small-town narrative. The light in Southold Township is pervasive yet shifting. It transforms the entire landscape from an oppressive space to an expansive one daily. The inhabitants of the peninsula, keenly aware of the ever-present horizon, are both exposed to the ocean and isolated from the mainland. Having spent much of my own childhood in Southold, I often return in search of moments of ambiguity. The images are not only informed by the hopes and disappointments of its inhabitants, but also by my own nostalgic sentiments of a distant home.

AUTHOR
Alana Perino was born in 1988 and led a split childhood between New York City, the North Fork of Long Island, and the stretch of highway between the two. Her photography explores the very human attempt to define the self through concepts of home, nationhood and heritage. She studied European Intellectual History and Photography at Wesleyan University, completing an honors photography thesis “Southold Township.” The series explores the isolated hamlet off of the Long Island Expressway, which she was never able to confidently call “home.” After working as a photojournalist in the Israeli-Palestinian territories, skeptical of the privileged nature of her stay as an American Jew, Alana returned to the United States. This experience in contested land culminated in a photo series “Territories” which highlights the conflation of a divided self-identity and divided country by calling attention to cultural, political, and physical borders. Continually drawn to issues of land identity, she has been completing several road trips across The United States to photograph American heritage sites. In this work, her photography continues to explore the contradictions inherent in an identity built upon the histories and mythologies of homeland. She highlights the uncertainty of the subject’s gaze, the ambiguity of the subject’s gesture, and the invisible yet persistent sense of boundary in the landscape. Her work focuses on these moments of tension to reflect upon universal and personal feelings of ambiguity of selfhood, home, and belonging. Alana resides in Oakland, California, where she works as a photographer, a lighting technician, and as an artist.

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