In the American South, where Nephi was born and later educated, truth often slips below the surface. In his photographs, too, he frequently finds himself trying to capture something that has disappeared, or just as it is vanishing from view -- be it a pattern of shapes converging into the horizon, a flurry of fleeing birds, ripples evaporating in mop water; or less tangible things like a child's innocence, the uneasy
coexistence of strangers, or the hope in an old man's eyes. He looks for honesty more than estheticism, emotion rather than perfection; he is drawn not only to the shapes that the light picks out but to how it affects shadow, texture, and the quality of reflection. Though his pictures range from the Andes to the Bosporus, from the rainforest of Ecuador to the fashion houses of Milan, and from the coast of Normandy
to the cobblestones of Paris and the country kitchens of the Cumberland Plateau, Nephi thinks that the most successful ones are those in which he has managed to record the quality that made something engrave itself on his memory, which is to say the thing that makes any of usremember a scene: not its physical structure and form, but the
ephemeral truth that the moment seems to reveal, before it slips once more out of sight. bio by: Gideon Lichfield and Sara Linton