The places where Adam Neese played as a child are gone. Or, rather, the places as he knew them—wooded and wild—no longer exist. Roads, housing developments, and strip malls have infiltrated Grapevine, Texas where he grew up, and while some spots linger as suburban wilds, others have been erased from all but Neese’s memories. In his series A Known World, he revisits those childhood landmarks where fantasy and woodland once combined to form magic, and documents the shifting landscape. 

The land was largely undeveloped while Neese advanced through school, and he and his friends explored the nearby woods, creeks, and rivers. The land was their own private Middle Earth, and each day they retreated to their kingdoms and ventured on quests, waged war—sometimes with up to 50 kids joining in the fray—and established rules and order for the new world. A Known World invites us into this history, and each image, named for principle friends or events that shaped Neese’s childhood, asks us to remember that for children, even the most unassuming landscape adopts mythic status. Neese’s work invites us into that myth even as it eschews simple romance or nostalgia. Both are present—it’s hard to see the images and not feel a pang of wistfulness—but the focus is not a romantic past or a desultory coming of age narrative that simplifies or obliterates the fact that these places in Grapevine change, are changing, and will continue to change. Yet even today, children will find in them hiding places, adventures, and relationships lived away from the demanding pressures of growing up.

Neese demonstrates a keen eye for the ways that altered landscapes, though changing, maintain something wild. “Trebazonia” is a lush tangle of trees, limbs, branches, and bushes. The woods appear impenetrable. Yet, just above the treetops on the right and left of the image, two highway or parking lot light posts rise into a blue sky. They are not obtrusive. They virtually blend into the mess of bush that fills most of the image, and yet, they are there in the background waiting to be discovered. We, as viewers, participate in the same sort of discovery as the kids who break through the edge of a wood and into a cleared, newly developed space. The transitional spot is the most tangled and confused even, but here, in Neese’s hands, it becomes ordered. The land has meaning, purpose even, and the encroaching development is secondary to the wild promise of the trees.

“The Meeting Hill, Kelsidonia” more explicitly draws attention to the way that built environments intrude into natural space. The expansive green of the grasses is punctuated by concrete cistern openings or drainage pipe entrances. Once the location of fantastical, role-play battles from Neese’s youth, in this image, the concrete structures rise up like so many outposts or spires. The concrete is bright in the foreground of a darkening wood behind, and the grass spreads out like a lonely battlefield that, without care, would have long since grown over with weeds and bramble. That this is a battlefield is obvious, even if the war that once raged here was not one between nature and human sprawl but armies of kids.

As Neese describes, Valley of the Moguls is one of the most extensive and memorable locations for him and his friends. Now obliterated by a subdivision, it was once the site of endless play. It also demonstrates Neese’s careful control by giving us a sense of the rolling, but managed, land that was once home to childhood games. Even so, if Neese has control of the lens, he is not controlling. The work here is not polemical. It’s suggestive, evocative, and, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, common and familiar precisely because it focuses on the particular and local. Neese's study of sites transcend idiosincrasia and transform into something relatable and shared. Indeed, Neese gives us in these photographs something universal. He gives us not just landscape, but memory of lives we once lived.

This article first appeared in Issue 14, The Explorers Issue.