Southern Cultures: The Photography Issue: Summer 2011

By Harry L. Watson

The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious, The 2011 Photography Issue
Tom Rankin, Guest Editor

Our second Photography issue features full-color photographs by William Eggleston, William Christenberry, and much more.

CONTENTS

Front Porch
by Harry L. Watson
"It requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists."

The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious
by Tom Rankin
"Photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice. It is, we might say, about rebuilding our sight in the face of blindness, of recovering our collective vision."

American Studies
by Michael Carlebach
"Many years ago I concluded that for me truth and beauty, and perhaps wit and wisdom as well, are more likely to reside in what is ordinary and seemingly insignificant. This is, perhaps, a sideways look at America and American culture, but it is one that can produce moments that describe us all, but without makeup and bereft of a spokesperson."

Mapping The Democratic Forest
The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston
by Ben Child
"When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the boldness of Eggleston's palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest."

Stereo Propaganda
by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier
"In this examination, magic and myth-two of my favorite vehicles-act as buffers to the dominant power structure. It brings together two bodies of collectibles, one personal and one commercial, with the intent of shifting stereotypes about race and southern culture."

Interview
"Those little color snapshots": William Christenberry
interviewed by William R. Ferris
"Santa Claus had brought me and my sister a small Brownie camera in the late 1940s, and I just loaded it with color film and went out to that Alabama landscape and began to photograph what caught my eye."

Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp
Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith
by Dolores Flamiano
"Mieth and Smith shared a belief that photography could bring social change. They viewed Pat Clark and Maude Callen as heroic healers whose stories would inspire racial understanding. Both photographers shot powerful images of the most visceral human experiences: birth, death, sexuality, and disease."

Women Working
by Susan Harbage Page
"'Rough. It is rough being a female.'"

Not Forgotten
The Day Is Past and Gone
Family Photographs from Eastern North Carolina
By Scott Matthews
"'It is in fact hard to get the camera to tell the truth; yet it can be made to, in many ways and on many levels. Some of the best photographs we are ever likely to see are innocent domestic snapshots.'"

All eight articles from this issue of Southern Cultures are also available individually as stand-alone ebooks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807868409

Book preview

front porch

It requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists. Harlem newsboy, photographed by Gordon Parks, 1943, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

What is it about photographs? They have been around since the 1830s but still seem far more novel than paintings or drawings. Photography equipment can be cheap and simple and takes no special talent to use, so everybody can take pictures. And we all do. Even so, it requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists.

The most important thing about photographs may be that they seem to be an exact replica of reality, though of course they’re not. Everything about a photograph is artificial and manipulated, from the camera and film (or computer chip) to the light, the focus, the angle, the framing, and the flat, fragile surface itself. The only things natural are usually hidden from the viewer—the eye and mind of the photographer and the hand that pushes the button.

The naturalist illusions of photographs make them favorite vehicles of memory. By freezing a moment in time, they seem to offer an immediate vision of pure reality. You look at a photograph and suddenly you are there on the scene, back at the moment when the shutter clicked and everything stood still. As historian Scott Matthews writes in this issue’s Not Forgotten, photographs are torchbearers of memory that seem to take us to the past as it really was, without distortion or deception. Family photos in particular can carry us back to vanished times, places, and people, to reconstruct, as Matthews puts it, a society that look[s] at once familiar and foreign. No one knows better than Matthews about the artificial and illusionary character of photographs. It is this artificial character that allows photos to carry so many warm memories. The photographer’s unobserved power to manipulate and capture a scene passes to the photograph itself, which continues to recreate a vision in memory—not the reality itself but the one we want to see and the photographer intended us to see. Knowing this, we still cherish our family snapshots. For Matthews and for us, the act of remembering repairs frayed connections to beloved people and the beloved past they lived in, restoring a precious sense of belonging to a ruptured world—he to them, they to him.

Are photographs special in the South? All around the world, people love their memories and their snapshots. But the South is often obsessed with memory, not only private and personal recollections, but public ones as well. Old times there are not forgotten, Dixie promises, and the Matthews box of family pictures is labeled The Good Ol’Days.

Is it the apparent truth and changelessness of photographs that makes them especially resonant for southern memory? Southerners have been through many changes that many of us did not welcome, and white southerners are especially apt to sentimentalize the past. A people whose peculiar institution long seemed, at least, to protect them from (or deprive them of) the hurley-burley of social and economic change, grew attached to things as they were. A society in constant motion, where any problem could be solved by moving away from it, held few charms. Antebellum southerners moved in great numbers from the South Atlantic to the Gulf states, only to recreate there a society based on the appearance of stability. Many others remained in communities where keeping a colonial land grant was not unheard of, and remembering great-grandparents was unremarkable. Much that followed those good old days was painful: military defeat, revolutionized race relations, the sting of poverty, the lure of cities, the sale of the old homeplace. And white southerners are not alone in such memories. No matter what suffering they endured, the blood and sweat of black southerners made the South their home. The Great Migration northward brought disappointment along with opportunity, which some have tried to remedy by reverse migration.

No wonder southerners hang on to their timeless photographs. The evidence shows that the South has always been changing, but photographs can bring a fond appearance of permanence. Or they can make change seem gentle, gradual, and manageable, like William Christenberry’s color pictures (reprinted here) of foliage overtaking a house. I miss living in the Deep South a lot, Christenberry tells us in this issue’s interview, though he chooses not to live there. He takes photographs instead and retires to comprehend them from afar. I like the sense of distance and mystery that generates feelings by living outside of the Deep South—a distance and mystery he explores with his camera.

So Southern Cultures returns with a second issue dedicated to photography, a theme we hope to revisit periodically. Tom Rankin, director of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, has generously served as our guest editor and again also has provided a superb introduction to the issue, and we have essays, interviews, and photo essays, from a rich sample of southern photographers—from greats like William Christenbery and William Eggleston to family shutter-bugs. May they bear torches for your memories, too.

HARRY L. WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious

by Tom Rankin

Photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice. Tenant farmer, Alabama, 1936, photographed by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

I am at war with the obvious," wrote William Eggleston as he reflected on his own photography in a brief afterword to his book The Democratic Forest.¹ Like other seemingly simple, terse dictums, one could initially find Eggleston’s words clever but all too evasive. I increasingly come back to his words, however—or, rather, the words come back to me—and see them as a concise and profound summation of the stance of the visionary photographer, as a definition of the role of the truest of artists. Photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice. It is, we might say, about rebuilding our sight in the face of blindness, of recovering our collective vision. And yet, the photographer is also in a perpetual battle to see beyond and around what he or she has already seen, to bring to their own work a sovereign vision, to borrow Walker Percy’s words, that is not obvious or redundant or derivative. This is particularly true in the American South where many forms of art—fiction, Hollywood movies, painting, popular music, to mention just some—have so defined and fixed our image of the region. The photographer must do battle with the mundane, as Eggleston so aptly characterizes it. And as war never ends, neither does the task to confront the obvious and make it new, make it sing, move it from ordinary and invisible to astonishingly beautiful and fully seen.

William Eggleston has both defined the American South within photography and refused to be limited by his home region or by being labeled a southern photographer. He moves amidst our oversized and dominant regional symbols, dodging the tendency of many of his fellow southerners to over-romanticize the South, often expressing cynicism toward his critics and others who see him as too defined by place. However widely he has photographed—and he’s produced work from all quarters of the world—Eggleston will always be best known for his debut book, William Eggleston’s Guide, which accompanied the very first solo exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and for the powerful imagery that he has produced in Mississippi, around Memphis, and throughout the South. He has stayed home geographically, but from his Memphis base he continues to expand his, and our, vision.

Critics and fellow artists derided Eggleston’s early color work as introducing mere snapshots into the refined world of art. Ansel Adams, in a letter to Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski, called Eggleston a put on. I find little ‘substance,’ Adams wrote. For me, [Eggleston’s photographs] appear as ‘observations,’ floating on the sea of consciousness . . . For me, most draw a blank. Szarkowski’s proclamation that Eggleston’s pictures were perfect provoked New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer to respond, Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Eggleston’s work gets much of its energy and brilliance—both in terms of color and its revelatory nature—from his sense of dynamism, of moving from one minute to the next, one place to another, as well as his pictorial aesthetic that uses color and composition to render motion: To tell the truth, these are composed in an instant, he said to Michael Almereyda, maker of the documentary William Eggleston and the Real World. The way I feel, if one waits to take the picture, it’s too late.²

The photographer is also in a perpetual battle to see beyond and around what he or she has already seen, to bring to their own work a sovereign vision, to borrow Walker Percy’s words, that is not obvious or redundant or derivative. Magnolia Cemetery, Mobile, Alabama, 2010, photographed by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

This idea resonates with fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty’s comments about her own work and the snapshot, an aesthetic she also saw as connected to motion and to passing time: "A good snapshot stops a moment from running