This exhibition traces, through the development of documentary photography, the interweaving strands that make up the fluidity of identity, race and culture that is the American South, addressing through a variety of photographic processes and styles across a large time period the concerns that have engaged human beings in this area for decades and now centuries: freedom, equality, liberty, nation, religion and economic subjugation.
This is such a complex and contested field to address in one photographic survey exhibition but it seems to me an admirable way to interrogate the ongoing histories and injustices of the American South. Documentary photography thrives in the South because the region has always been ground zero of the social disorder reverberating throughout the nation, a place that seems lost in the past. Indeed this richly layered and nuanced exhibition seems to be more fully focused on the dystopic rather than any celebration of American South culture per se and here I am particularly thinking of all the achievements in the areas of arts, literature, food, music β for example the energy of gospel, bluegrass and jazz.
Yes, there are poetic photographs in the exhibition but there is little sign of joy or happiness in any of the images. Which is why I have included that most singular image at the top of the posting not in the exhibition by John Vachon of a Black American smiling and laughing.
What a joy! The Southern landscape can be seen as the repository of memory, history, and trauma but it can also be seen as the repository for families, love, kindness, respect and connection between human beings β not always opposition and conflict. The photographs are memory containers for still living people. Photographs are containers of, fragments of, memories of, histories of, events β remembrances of events β brought from past into present, informing the future, showing only snippets of the stories of both past and present lives.
Parallel to the usual thought that photographs are about death, they are also memory containers for still living people. As we look back into these photographs the people in them look forward to us, and live in us here and now. They expect more from us, to fight still against the further rise of intolerance, racism and right wing fascism, and to grasp that the joys and mysteries of life should be open to all.
