Lost Girls of the American South

Photographer: Audrey Gretz
Model: Samantha Cruz

The sort of juxtaposition these photographs in particular explored was the feeling of being a 16 year old girl, becoming a 22 year old woman in the American south. A hazy place that never leaves your veins, try as you might. Even when you grow up and move away and attempt to exorcise its impact on you through art and culture and liberal media. Every girl, every human, feels like they want to grow up and run to a place where they can be someone else. Learning the range of our own emotions forces us to face the falsity of the flat images we grow up seeing. Girls are sad and happy, lost and found, creepy but cute, out of place but also somehow perfectly balanced; And everything in between. – Audrey Gretz

Audrey Gretz is a photographer who expresses herself mostly through film photos and collage. As a college student at UNCC, she is majoring in Japanese and near majoring in Studio Arts, Photography, World Religion and basically anything else meta that keeps one safe from that encroaching graduation date. She leads a second life in Tokyo where she hopes to return soon to pursue her other passions. She enjoys finding bits of art in everyday life and the emotional connectivities that art provides. She one day aspires to own a black cat named Jiji.