Photo Essay
“What does a liberated life mean for queer southerners and for the folks around us? When will home accept us?” AS A CHILD IN BIRMINGHAM, I saw girls visit my masculine-presenting neighbor at night. They talked through the screen at her bedroom window. I wondered why I’d never see them enter the house, and it »
Photo Essay
“The older I got, the more I realized that our acceptance was . . . fragile, conditional. The signs were small but telling.” FRUSTRATION WITH MY COUNTRY came first. One evening in the early 1970s, my mom and dad debated whether to allow me and my sister to watch a tv news special about the 1963 »
Photo Essay
“To be southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.” TO BE AN IMAGE that regards the historic South’s impression. To be an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, a memory … of that physical and nonphysical region. To feel of the South, and southern, like an accent can. To »
Photo Essay
As quickly as I found myself in the family way, I just as quickly found myself giving birth. A strange birth following a car pile-up. Blood in the crotch of my underwear. Seven layers of skin peeled back and sewn together again in under thirty minutes. Suddenly, a two-pound baby was born, looking anything but »
Photo Essay
It’s hard to believe it has been ten days since the storm. During that time, I’ve driven almost one thousand miles getting into communities that were devastated by Hurricane Helene and running supplies to folks. I traveled to Marion, Swannanoa, Hendersonville, Brevard, Rosman, Ashe County, Chimney Rock, and Bat Cave. In the first few days, »
Photo Essay
“In the most core-shaking moments of my life, I learned to return to these places to move beyond this physical form and ground my spiritual self.” Self-portraiture is the way I navigate myself back to my body. For years, my body did not feel like it belonged to me until I started photographing myself in »
Photo Essay
As Georgia poll workers came under fire for alleged election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the accusations stood in stark contrast to my own experiences as a poll worker in North Carolina during the same election. I had signed myself up in response to the urgent plea for poll workers amidst the pandemic, when »
Art
Dawoud Bey’s Untitled (The Light on the Trail) could be anywhere that is warm and wet enough to produce this tangle of plant life. But stay still in front of this photograph and really look. Somehow all of the wild growth frames an opening. And inside that rough circle, the light spirals clockwise toward the »
Photo Essay
“They drive by an old-timey church with one door for the men and a separate door for the women and a graveyard out back where the stones pop up like teeth in the night.” When Charlie sings, her sister Audra’s voice follows, the voice of a grown woman inside a little-girl body, high and lonesome »
Photo Essay
Scholars Eric Savoy and Robert Martin describe American Gothic as a “discursive field in which a metonymic national ‘self’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness.” In What Has Been Will Be Again (2020–2022), photographer Jared Ragland underscores the significance not only of his art form but of place as an important contributor »
Photo Essay
For the last few years, northward breezes have pushed more water from the Gulf onto the land—breaching marshes, overtopping the banks of bayous, and flooding roadways and people’s yards. Some of the submerged roads are the only ways in and out of narrow bayou-side communities strung along South Louisiana. Louisiana is at the forefront of »
Photo Essay
The Snapshot: Climate issue features more than 60 photographs and accompanying short reflections from artists, activists, photojournalists, and scientists to provide a “snapshot” look at climate impacts across the South. As climatologist Angel Hsu writes in the issue’s introduction, we set out with this issue to make the “invisible visible,” “using images and words from the »