Images and text by Sam Gulliver
Congratulations Sam Gulliver
2026 Daylight Photo Award Winner!
Not Really Now (Not Anymore) is about the personal and cultural tensions I associate with the Midwest region of America, the place I call home. Rather than treating the region as empty or forgotten, I see it as a setting rich with stories that speak to a broader sense of unease in American life.
Inspired by Gothic imagery and themes, the work touches on ideas like hauntings, ruins, and historical trauma, as well as what theorist Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future”; the creeping sense that time has stalled, the future never arrived, leaving us to continuously relive the past. The Midwest, in this sense, becomes a fable for a larger cultural disorientation.
The project reflects on how the region handles its past: civil war reenactments that mix celebration with discomfort, Indigenous lands turned into tourist attractions, and hometowns of serial killers that have become part of local lore. These scenes explore how history is remembered, reshaped, and sometimes ignored.
At its heart, this project is also about reckoning with what it means to be from the Midwest, how the region’s history informs identity, and how its contradictions shape daily life. It’s a personal attempt to look closely at the myths I grew up with and the realities that exist alongside them.
The resulting images move between the surreal and the everyday, blending fact and fiction, past and present. The work carries an eerie tone, but it’s grounded in a genuine effort to understand a place that feels both familiar and strange.
Sam Gulliver
Working in a modern documentary tradition, Sam Gulliver uses photography the way a fabulist might — finding in particular a kind of modern mythology, where a community, a subculture, or a stretch of road becomes a story about something much larger. His photographs don't document so much as distill.
