Moving between his family home in the highlands of northeast Tennessee and the Kansas heartland where his wife was born, Shawne Brown makes See the Elephant, a series along the margins of the American Bible Belt.
See the Elephant was made in the margins of the American Bible Belt, along a line that runs from Brown's family home in the highlands of northeast Tennessee to the geodetic center of the continent in the Kansas heartland, where his wife was born. Brown moved back and forth between the two regions, working to see and come to terms with the cultural landscape both of them grew up in.
The title borrows a phrase from the Civil War. Brown writes that “Seeing the elephant” was “an expression used during the Civil War by soldiers whose heroic ideals of warfare were destroyed by experiencing the carnage of actual battle.” What began as the shock of combat hardened into something more portable, a way of naming any collision between expectation and fact.
From there the phrase became shorthand, in Brown's words, for “gaining knowledge through experience at the high cost of disillusionment.” The series does not treat that disillusionment as loss. “Disillusionment, however, can be recognized as a gift that allows one the possibility of seeing more clearly, even somewhere as complicated as the place you're from,” Brown writes.
Brown was born near Kingsport, in northeast Tennessee, and studied photography at East Tennessee State University, where he earned an MFA. Now based in Nashville, he has built a body of work around the cultural and physical landscape of his home state, its ties to regional and national history, and its resistance to the rapid changes reshaping the area.
See the Elephant sits inside that longer project. Rather than settle the question of where he is from, it keeps returning to it, treating the familiar as something that has to be learned again. The series was shortlisted in Booooooom's 2026 Book Award open call.
