University of North Carolina Press, in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2002. Sodom Laurel Album takes its name from an isolated North Carolina mountain-hollow community of ramshackle homesteads, deteriorating barns, worn-out tobacco fields, and tough, “ordinary” people. Rob Amberg could have breezed in for a photo-shoot, taken a few stereotypical or even romanticized shots »
“‘I never really knew my mother very well and I think that I was trying to figure out who she was. Since she wasn’t around anymore, the only things I could photograph were the places that she’d lived in.’” In the summer of 1936, when Walker Evans traveled with James Agee to Hale County, Alabama, »
“The usual terrain of southern homecoming celebrations—cheerleaders rah-rahhing, smartly clad members of the homecoming court soaking up the crowd, mothers and babies at parade’s edge, hastily built fraternity floats—contrast with markers of heightened national pride and sudden, uncomfortable transformation.” Grief, fear, pride, love, sympathy, courage, anger, hate. The attacks of 9-11 provoked a mix of »
“The crowd was at a fever pitch, seemingly waiting for an excuse to tear something apart. Would it be me?” In local auditoriums, national guard armories, gyms, and bars, people gather to watch epic battles between heroes and villains. These are regular working people, waitresses and factory workers, farmers and mechanics, retail clerks, young and »
“There are times when you come upon a scene and everything is right. It tells a story. It has a center of interest. It has emotion. It has people in it who are beautiful people–and I don’t mean Hollywood beautiful.” Billy E. Barnes is one of America’s most widely published photographers. His pictures have appeared »
“The greatest influence on these portraits came in the form of Charles Kuralt, the late journalist who humbly traveled the road and made all those he met heroic.” Brian Jolley describes himself not as a travel photographer but as “a photographer who travels.” For years, maps have held a certain fascination for Jolley, with their »
Photo Essay
“Robinson’s photographs give us something of an antidote to the smearing and demonization of homosexuals sanctioned and encouraged by government officials for political gain. Before the assassination of a president, before the rise of the homophobic radical right, before AIDS and the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard, very southern gay men in a very southern place »
“I was living in Boston and Buffalo in those years, and no prison director in either of those states ever let me beyond the sally port without a guard watching me every moment and listening to every word I said or that anyone said to me. Neither of those states let me bring a camera »
“You’d better turn on CNN; looks like your house is on fire.” Photographer Thomas Neff entered the city in the first days after Katrina as a volunteer first responder. He soon began taking large-format black and white photographs and writing down the stories of natives he found marooned there, when the city was eighty percent »
“He wasn’t a professional photographer, but he was Kernersville’s unofficial documentarian, and the hundreds of images he left behind portray a small Piedmont North Carolina community in the 1930s and 1940s.” I came upon the pictures about fifteen years ago. I was searching for something in my parents’ guest room in High Point, North Carolina, »
Photo Essay
“He documented tornadoes and floods of biblical proportions, a fire at a cotton mill and fires in the downtown business district, train wrecks and celebrities such as world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, Columbus native son playwright Tennessee Williams, and the parents of celebrated writer Truman Capote.” Sometime in the 1930s, jack-of-all-trades photographer O. N. Pruitt »
“I approach these things as a moralist, really, because honesty and truth are moral values, but beauty is something else. And it’s a word that should be used damn carefully.” Few books have touched me so deeply as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I first read it as an undergraduate student at Davidson »