“It requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists.” 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, »
“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.” »
“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 »
“The headlining band were nasty rogues, hitting on freakishly skinny underage chicks while I heard it all half asleep.” The backstage area has long held a fascination for music fans. There is a mystique about being “with the band” and allowed in places where fans rarely get to go. Despite the perceived glamour of backstage »
“‘There’s no choosing. It isn’t choice. Are you the daughter of somebody who was somebody who was somebody? And if you are, and you’re not a heroin addict, you are there.’” The grand staircase fronting the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston leads to large, wooden, locked double doors and instructions to ring the bell »
“If convention has it right, these are writers who bear something close to a genetic predisposition to produce a literature suffused with place.” For the past twenty years, I have made a career as a teacher of American literature. For the last twelve, I have worked also, with equal seriousness and passion, as a photographer. »
“Vimala Rajendran’s dinners created a space for people to meet over a common table (or couch, or picnic blanket), make friends, support the livelihoods of others in their region, and imagine how, on any given Wednesday morning while peeling garlic, they could also positively impact global communities.” Almost every week for thirteen years, Vimala Rajendran »
“The bill gained quick notoriety for outdoing Arizona, Georgia, and all other states in the restrictions and penalties levied on unauthorized immigrants, as well as on the citizens, community members, employers, and health and law enforcement agencies that assist, employ, or regulate them.” On June 1, 2011, the Alabama state legislature passed the “Beason-Hammon Alabama »
“‘Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday.’” The Civil War was a little more than a year old in the first days of September 1862, and Confederate »
“I drilled until the book was lace.” The gaps between experience and history are filled with unauthorized cosmologies. Worldview. Origins of myth. While artifacts of war are found in pawnshops, artifacts of survival are found in cosmology. Through my work, I chart the southern imaginary—from the Culture Wars back to Reconstruction, from a Food Lion »
“When the unlimited energy of adolescence comes to bear on the limited experience of childhood, the results often swing toward one of the poles – an enthusiastic confirmation of the culture a child grew into or a bold rejection of the culture they grew out of.” We devote our teenage years, perhaps more than any »
Photo Essay
In the autumn of 1938 a photographer named Charles A. Farrell visited a seasonal mullet fishing camp at Brown’s Island, in Onslow County, North Carolina. What he discovered there captured his imagination: a remote hamlet of fishermen’s shanties far from civilization and two legendary clans of fishermen in relentless pursuit of one of the Atlantic’s »