Michael Loderstedt: The Yellowhammer's Cross

exhibition catalogue for PhotoCentric

A catalog of photographs and a collection of non-fiction essays about the artist's formative years on Emerald Isle, NC.

From Michael Loderstedt’s artist statement:
A young man’s wild journey to become an artist set on a remote barrier island where sexual and substance abuse replace any real parenting. A story of the redemptive power of nature and an interminable will to create.

From, “Things Turning Around, Emerald Isle, 1976”
It seemed like everybody living on the island was running from something. Some, like us, from bad marriages, others from the law or the inability to hold down a straight job. It was an island of sloppy fixers—retail operators selling bait, tackle, snacks and beachwear to the tourists, pickers and sellers. There were a few retired military families who needed to live close to the outdoors, frankly because they were too crazy for a domesticated life in a town. Nearly all of them drinkers, most of them hard drinkers, and us kids got to know quickly whether they were mean drunks or happy ones. Happy drunks might give you a twenty thinking it was a dollar, mean ones might break their foot kicking an old car battery on the porch thinking it was a cat. The children of mean drunks built the best camps, well-hidden in the dense forest under towering live oaks on the backside of the island, near the quiet water. They were our escape pods, and our cathedrals.

88 pages
6 x 9 inches