Snapshot
“We watch the evidence of a hard day’s labor evaporate into the deepening night sky.” We are banging down the highway in the rental car, Derek and I, leaving Arkansas, heading to New Orleans, but we’ve left time to wander in Mississippi. No real place to go, but looking for nothing in particular, follow your »
Snapshot
“All you can see is a moment when the late afternoon light shone down on some old stone and prairie grass. A frame made from a town’s future in the past.” The photographic form can really only tell us one thing: what was there, once. This photograph was taken on a muggy June day in »
Photo Essay
“There’s an unsettledness that attracted me to these spaces, that maybe draws in people of a wandering sort, but it doesn’t allow for getting too attached.” From 2005 to 2007, I used a Rolleicord twin lens reflex to photograph RV parks across North Carolina, making color landscapes and portraits to document a vanishing world. I »
Photo Essay
New Orleans Second Line Parades “Sunday Second Lines nod to the past but embrace the present, dancing along that thin line where tradition thrives, four hours of unbridled jubilation at a time.” On roughly forty Sundays a year, the hardworking members of New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs take turns celebrating the everyday joy »
Snapshot
“I left fifty years ago. Why would I want to come back?” I am back in North Carolina, remembering when I was back in North Carolina and dreamed of coming home. After running away from my hometown for most of my life, I can’t believe I dream of going home every day. My family abandoned »
Snapshot
“Photographers and collectors work from cousin impulses.” Documentary is kindred to collecting. Photographers and collectors work from cousin impulses. As a young girl, I went on a family vacation to Arizona. We did a “gold mining” tourist expedition and with untanned skin scooped our strainers in the streams. I noticed a rock in the water, »
Essay
Creating Dangerously in The Land Where the Blues Began “Worth Long’s lifelong quest to preserve the creativity of those who sang, hollered, prayed, played, and lived the blues, dangerously, was one of his greatest contributions as an activist.” In the fall of 1967, folk music columnist Israel “Izzy” Young expressed his enthusiasm for the emergence »
Photo Essay
From the Documentary Moment Issue, Kate Medley’s “Gas Station South” has us thinking about communal experiences—especially in this moment of isolation. Who do we miss bumping elbows with when we are encouraged not to go out? What role in our lives does this type of community interaction play? Also, what counts as essential? Ask anyone »
Photo Essay
“The ruins remain overgrown with castor plants, which can be, alternately, an excellent source of sustenance if cooked properly or a natural source of cyanide.” The traditional Bahamian response to the request for someone’s name, upon introduction, is typically their name preceded by “I name.” Such a title seemed fitting for this project after I »
Memoir
1. Abiding Metaphors When I was three years old, I nearly drowned in a hotel pool in Mexico. My earliest memory is of what seemed a long moment, as if I were suspended there, looking up through a ceiling of water, the high sun barely visible overhead. I do not recall being afraid as I »
Essay
“The documentary artist attempts, however imperfectly, to do something about what they witness, how they feel, what they are compelled to say.” For many years I’ve forbidden students in my photography courses from coming to class and talking about an image they saw but didn’t take. In a class built around the making of pictures, »
Essay
“People want to study [the South’s] differences and continuities, its joys, tragedies, and outrages, to affirm the significance of place in a world of displacement.” This issue carries Southern Cultures through its twenty-fifth year and past our four anniversary issues: Backward/Forward, Inside/Outside, Left/Right, and Here/Away. We hope our readers have enjoyed these special numbers as »