the girl next door

Photography and nostalgia often have gone hand in hand; the scrapbook, the family album, the postcard, the Polaroid, even the Instagram post all reinforce a love for the way something was. In Nashville: Scenes from the New American South, novelist Ann Patchett and photographer Heidi Ross — both longtime Nashvillians — instead set out to show, in all its varied forms, how Nashville is.

“As emotions go, nostalgia is both cheap and unrealistic,” Patchett writes. “Sometimes we’re not even nostalgic for things we liked, it was just that we were used to seeing a particular thing in a particular place.”

The book, consisting of photos mostly taken in 2017, is about Nashville’s multiple identities: how the city is home to both the Grand Ole Opry and The Gulch — one a legendary mainstay of Nashville arts, the other a neighborhood that many longtime residents call made-up.

It is expressly not intended to immortalize Nashville. Nashville, both the movie and the television show, already have done that. It’s a project born of and meant for this moment, a love letter to Nashville’s charms and quirks as it evolves further.

A Love Letter To A Changing Nashville, In Photographs

As sonny said: