Most people travel Brainerd Road with somewhere else to be, passing aging storefronts, shopping centers, churches, restaurants and old buildings that have outlived their original purposes while watching the car ahead or waiting for the next light to change.
Liza Blair stops and looks around.
Blair sees decades layered along the busy corridor: structures dating to the 1950s alongside newer development, businesses that have come and gone and buildings repurposed for something their original occupants probably never imagined.
“You have stories being told in these places that, for most of us, we just want to drive by as fast as we can,” Blair says. “We don’t really take in what’s happening on either side of us.”
Over the coming months, Blair plans to do exactly that.
A curator and museum specialist at Chattanooga State Community College, Blair is developing an analog photography essay documenting the Brainerd community with support from an ArtsBuild Artists Work Grant.
ArtsBuild awarded $135,000 to 30 Hamilton County artists for its 2026-27 grant cycle, with individual grants of up to $5,000 supporting projects intended to bring art into communities.
Blair’s project will continue through February 2027 and culminate in public exhibitions. Her goal is to produce 30 finished photographs, primarily black-and-white images encompassing architecture and landscapes, street scenes and community spaces, people and activities.
She also plans to meet with neighborhood associations, business owners, organizations and community figures, supplementing some of her photographs with enough written context to help viewers understand the people and places they’re seeing.
A personal geography
The subject is personal.
Blair is from Chattanooga but spent years away before returning in the early 2000s and eventually buying a home in Brainerd, where her family lives.
Her memories of the community reach back to childhood, when she attended church there and rode with her family along Belvoir Avenue, fascinated by its older houses and imagining what it might be like to live in one.
Today, she does, occupying a Brainerd home built in the 1920s.
Over the years, the community has acquired what Blair describes as a kind of “lore” in her mind, with Brainerd Road at its center. She likes its congestion, its jumble of buildings and businesses and the evidence of change accumulated along it.
“Every place has a Brainerd Road to some degree,” Blair says. “Every city, every town has that one road people either love driving on or avoid like the plague.”
For Blair, the appeal lies partly in what remains visible from one era to the next. Brainerd Road doesn’t present a uniform landscape built at one moment in Chattanooga’s growth. Older buildings survive alongside newer ones, their occupants and uses changing over time, while established neighborhoods remain tucked behind the commercial corridor.
Her photographs won’t attempt to catalog all of that or present an authoritative visual history of the community. Instead, Blair is interested in the details that catch her eye: architecture, neighborhoods and activity, but also places that appear forgotten or seem suspended between active and inactive.
“It’s about capturing the Brainerd I see,” she says.
Blair has already begun shooting, keeping a list of locations and themes she wants to explore while leaving room for the spontaneity of street photography. She generally heads out early in the morning or later in the afternoon, avoiding the harsh contrast of midday light, and walks until something draws her attention.
So far, her subjects have included street scenes, parks, a community swimming pool and abandoned buildings she remembers being occupied when she was young.
As the project continues, she expects people and community activity to become prominent in the work. She’s especially looking forward to photographing football at Brainerd High School and activities around the recreation center and its tennis courts.
“There’s so much about Brainerd that interests me,” Blair says. “It’s going to be hard to narrow it down to 30 good prints.”
Waiting for the image
That goal is more ambitious than it might sound because Blair isn’t taking hundreds of digital photographs, reviewing them instantly and selecting her favorites on a computer. She’s shooting film and producing the images through a darkroom process she first learned as an undergraduate and returned to recently after years away.
Once she finishes a roll, Blair must process the film to produce negatives, create a contact sheet that allows her to examine the frames, decide which photographs merit further attention and then make finished prints.
Producing 30 exhibition-worthy images could require dozens of rolls of film and hundreds of exposures.
The process also leaves her with something digital photography eliminates: uncertainty. Blair can choose the location, compose the frame, judge the light and draw on everything she knows about photography, but she can’t look at the back of a camera to see whether the image worked.
“You can have all the knowledge and skill, the best lighting and all the right conditions when you’re shooting,” Blair says. “But you still don’t know what you have until you see it.”
That uncertainty is particularly apparent at this early stage of the Brainerd project. Blair believes she’s captured some landscapes and swimming pool scenes she’ll like, but she can’t describe a photograph that especially pleases her because most of the images remain undeveloped.
Blair’s preference for analog photography isn’t a rejection of digital technology. She works digitally as well and believes strong work can be produced in either medium. What draws her back to film is the degree to which making the photograph extends beyond pressing the shutter.
She processes the film, mixes chemicals, works with an enlarger and makes decisions in the darkroom that affect the finished image.
“For me, it’s about the role you play in making the image,” Blair says. “You’re involved in the whole process, not just taking the picture but creating the finished photograph.”
Most of the Brainerd project will be in black and white, another preference rooted partly in the photographic tradition that influenced Blair.
In her 20s, she was drawn to the Farm Security Administration photographers who documented American life during the Great Depression. Their work helped establish the visual vocabulary that still feels natural to her when she thinks about documentary photography.
That documentary impulse also predates her current project. Blair’s academic background is in folklore, and she’s spent more than 20 years working in arts education and nonprofits.
At Chattanooga State, she oversees programming connected with the college’s arts center and Outdoor Museum of Art. Her earlier photographic work included a project involving Chattanooga’s Glass Street neighborhood and documentary projects for the Tennessee Overhill Association examining regional artists, recreational use of the Cherokee National Forest and the foodways of Southeast Tennessee communities.
Independent photography gradually became harder to fit into her life as Blair balanced work with raising two children. Now that her children are teenagers, she’s finding room for it again.
A recent photography class put her back in a darkroom and renewed her interest in making her own work just as another application period for the Artists Work Grant approached.
Blair had known about the ArtsBuild program for years through her work in Chattanooga’s arts community. This time, rather than telling herself she might apply another year, she decided the timing was right.
“This is me getting back in the game,” she says.
The grant is paying for the physical materials that return requires. Film photography is expensive, and Blair expects the funding to go toward film, photographic paper, processing chemicals and frames for the finished work.
The materials consume money quickly, she says, but the award gives her enough to complete the project.
The work will eventually return to the community that inspired it. Blair is planning public exhibitions in Brainerd, including a potential early show at a community recreation center and another at Eastgate Library in the spring.
If both exhibitions happen, she hopes the later show will contain enough new work that people who attend both encounter different photographs rather than the same collection twice.
Expanding the view
What Blair doesn’t want is for those viewers to leave believing that 30 photographs have somehow explained Brainerd.
Blair is conscious of the assumptions people can carry about different parts of Chattanooga, particularly communities they know mainly from passing through them. Her photographs will offer one perspective rather than a definitive portrait.
“I think we all have biases or preconceived ideas about different communities in Chattanooga,” Blair says. “I don’t want people to leave thinking, ‘Oh, this is Brainerd.’”
Instead, Blair hopes the photographs might complicate an existing impression. Someone who thinks of Brainerd in a particular way might see something unexpected in a neighborhood, building, landscape or person and reconsider what else is there.
“Maybe this can expand that view,” she says.
For now, Blair is still near the beginning. Many of the photographs she’s taken exist only as latent images on rolls of film, holding street scenes, landscapes, buildings and moments of community life she remembers composing but hasn’t yet seen.
Eventually, she’ll enter the darkroom, process the negatives and discover what she captured. Some frames will work and others won’t, and from them, Blair will gradually assemble her version of a community she’s known since childhood.
On a road where so many people are focused on getting somewhere else, Blair is taking the time to look at what’s on either side.