Photo Essay
I made these pictures with a 4×5 Horseman studio camera during the Reagan years of 1984 to about 1988, when I was fresh into pictures. View cameras have bellows and expose larger negatives than handheld cameras. The Horseman I used was designed for studio work, as opposed to other view cameras made for the field, »
Art
The following works were included in the exhibition People Get Ready: Southern Lens at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The images coalesce around an untitled photograph from William Eggleston’s series The Democratic Forest. This photograph captures Eggleston’s “democratic” perspective that engaging imagery could be found in any subject at nearly every turn »
Photo Essay
We’re not 8 AM folks. So we mostly missed the start of William Ferris’s courses on Southern Music and Southern Literature, which he long held down the hall at our home in the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC. Instead, we tended to catch Bill filing out of the classroom with »
Photo Essay
Poet, librarian, and activist Anne Spencer was the first African American woman to be featured in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Much of her poetry focuses on her beloved home and garden. Tended for over fifty years and lovingly restored after her death, the garden is described in one poem as “half of my »
Photo Essay
Part of our Shutter series on southern photography, Grace Hale examines Sally Mann’s current exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, “A Thousand Crossings,” on view March 4–May 28, 2018. Beauty is everywhere in photographer Sally Mann’s exhibition A Thousand Crossings at the National Gallery of Art. In the first room of the show, her »
Photo Essay
McClellanville, a seaside fishing village, was founded in the early 1850s by rice planters from the Santee Delta. The little village became the summer home of these wealthy planters, who left their plantations for a few months each year to escape illnesses like malaria. The village contained modest “shotgun” houses and some very fine, large »
Photo Essay
Over sixty years ago, my grandfather was offered a sizable piece of waterfront property at the northern entrance of Buxton Village on Hatteras Island for $3,000 by his aunt, the famed village postmistress, Maude White. At the time, the parcel—no more than a half-mile wide from sound to sea—was like other parts of what is »
Photo Essay
Down in the valley,Valley so lowHang your head overHear the wind blow Down in the valley,Walking between,Telling our storyHere’s what it sings. ”Down in the Valley,” ballad collected by Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (1927) Reflective, mysterious moments of pause punctuate portraits of musicians and artists in the Cumberland Plateau, highlighting the vacuum of time »
Art
Emmet Gowin, “Here on Earth Now: Notes from the Field,” Pace/MacGill Gallery, September 28, 2017–January 27, 2018. Before cable television, video games, Netflix, and smartphones, insects filled the summers of southern childhoods. Remembering the pain of past stings, kids learned to watch for wasps’ nests in the poles of swing sets and chain link fences. »
Essay
In one of his most compelling and enigmatic photographs, Reverend Lonzie Odie Taylor (1899–1977) sits on the running board of his car, fist under his chin. A Baptist minister and self-taught African American photographer, Taylor’s photographs—including his self-portraits—reflect desires and aspirations for material success in a rapidly modernizing South, including for cars. In offering mobility, »
Photo Essay
Manifest is an ongoing project, a portfolio of nearly one hundred photographs of African American material culture held in public and private collections throughout the United States. These repositories have accumulated diaries, receipts for the purchase of humans, hair, a drum, a door, photographs, figurines, and other artifacts—some with great historical significance, some the commonplace, »
Photo Essay
I think I’d been there five minutes when Larry pulled up alongside me in a golf cart, abruptly. My camera dangled from my neck as I approached him. “You know there’s a fifty dollar fine for taking photos in Love Valley.” “Oh, well . . . I didn’t think . . .” I muttered. “I’m »