2015 will go down as the year that at last saw the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House, but change had come at a human cost, prompted by outrage at the massacre of nine members of the congregation at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. Had 50 years not passed since the events of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama? It was unfathomable that time seemed to stand still. And yet, in March, returning to Selma on the anniversary of the attacks on protesters, Gay Talese found a town “which seems now eternally tethered to the events of 1965.” “Selma today,” he wrote, “is a place expected to carry perhaps more symbolic weight than any small city can bear.” This was the year that shattered the myth of Atticus Finch, the year that Ta-Nehisi Coates addressed his son, “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.” It was the year that Sally Mann wrote as vividly of the South as she had photographed it, of a life spent in the thrall of its beautiful wilderness but forever haunted by its history.
That sort of peculiarly twisted past-is-never-past relationship to place is not the sole provenance of the American South, but it is one that those of us who grew up there can attest to. And it resonates memorably in some of the best photo books released in the past year, in both present-day pictures and in images that date back to the turn of the century—in ways both personal and political, overt and unconscious. Photography has its own inherently, peculiarly twisted relationship to history, anxiously aware of the possibility of loss and the fleeting nature of every moment, the fact that as soon as a picture is made it moves into another tense. To look at any photograph is to reckon with the past and trigger a dialogue with the present. This year some of the most compelling photo books were those that delved seemingly further backward, as well as some that seemed to, yielding a portrait that is varied, anachronistic, and speaks very much to the world of now.
When he set out, in 1956, to discover whether the Brown v. Board of Education ruling had done much to change daily life, Gordon Parks discovered a Deep South still vastly divided among racial lines. At the water fountains and along school fences, he captured the contrast in full color photographs, images that, 60 years after the fact, retain a powerful immediacy. Some, collected in Segregation Story (Steidl), are published for the first time.
Though schools had been integrated decades before, senior proms were still segregated in Montgomery County, Georgia, where Gillian Laub photographed over the course of a dozen years. A year later, a young black man Laub had portrayed was murdered by a white patriarch, and she returned to track the effects on a shocked and grieving community, and to photograph its first integrated prom, for Southern Rites, an HBO film and a book, published by Damiani this year.
Elsewhere in the South the lines are often less starkly drawn. Like her cousin William Eggleston, Maude Schuyler Clay was drawn to the camera from an early age, inspired by their grandfather, and her new book, Mississippi History (Steidl) contains 30 years’ worth of photographs made in and around the “Grey Gardens of the South,” as she refers to her home, fully aware of all the gothic connotations that implies. But her portraits of friends and family are radiant, and they astonish with their subtle intimacy, as if Clay spent the past three decades lurking around backyards and porches in Delta magic hours.
Prefaced by the bizarre story of a rare sighting of the Northern Lights on a South Carolina school bus, which some on board viewed as the arrival of the Rapture, the found photographs collected in Lead Kindly Light (Dust to Digital) represent ordinary moments frequently struck by accidents of light, filled with blight and blur. The book’s title is taken from one of the 46 songs in its accompanying CDs, a hymn recorded in 1927 by the Loveless Twins Quartet, a pair of identical twin brothers who married a pair of identical twin sisters. Naturally they formed a gospel group, and their odd pairing mirrors the pictures and the strangeness and imperfections of real life, the unheard-of moments in history.
Music is the force behind An Iconography of Chance: 99 Photographs of the Evanescent South (Elsinore Press), shot by the Memphis-rooted rock ’n’ roll raconteur Tav Falco. In his years fronting the goth-psychedelic band Panther Burns, he roamed the swamps and backwoods, making black-and-white images of juke joint dance parties; masked balls; and portraits of fellow musicians Sleepy John Estes, Charlie Rich, and The Cramps.
Music is what sustained the prisoners whose songs lured Alan Lomax back to Mississippi to make field recordings of the vigorous work songs and haunting blues he heard sung by convicts assigned to work a plantation in the late ’40s and ’50s. Parchman Farm, named for the oldest maximum-security penitentiary in the state, contains some 77 archival photos of the workers and 44 songs, packaged in a beautiful cutout slipcased edition (Dust to Digital), and it has just been nominated for a Grammy. Made nearly a half century later, Alec Soth’s photograph of another penitentiary farm, at Angola State Prison in Louisiana, resounds with a heavy echo. That image is from Sleeping by the Mississippi, a book of a trip Soth made from his native Minnesota southward, traveling the river’s course in a backward Huck Finn path, photographing the people he met along the way. No body of water holds such metaphoric weight in the American imagination, and the current carries him to other drifters, hobo camps, church fronts, and hotel rooms of Memphis, New Orleans, Vicksburg, and onward. That book and more of Soth’s greatest hits, many now out of print, are reproduced in miniature and boxed together in Gathered Leaves (Mack).
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, when asked what he was up to, the photographer William Eggleston, never one to elaborate in speech, answered that he was working on a project that would span several thousand photographs. People laughed, he said, but it was true. And now, with the arrival of a monumental 10-volume edition of The Democratic Forest, the year’s major, massive photographic event, he can emphatically say it was so. Whittled down to just 150 pictures in full, saturated Egglestonian color when it was published in 1989, the book now stretches to a vast expanse of images, most never before published, vividly illustrating his definition of what it means to photograph democratically—in other words, everything. Eggleston assigned no more importance to a human face than he did a cross-section of a hubcap, a tree trunk, a dinner plate. His pictures, wrote Eudora Welty in an introduction, “focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!” (Somewhere David Lynch was listening.)
Here, in a dynamically highly arranged narrative, the ordinary explodes with implication; by bringing the minor details of the world to our attention, Eggleston brings everything to our attention. Radiating out from his native Mississippi and adopted Memphis, in the most anonymous, seemingly unremarkable, yet florid corners and alleyways and backrooms, and on to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Berlin, as if propelled by a hitchhiker with a camera, perhaps mounted to his hip or attached to the dashboard of a car, or even underneath it. And then the whole thing swerves, with dizzying power, heading back home South, along dirt roads, flashbacking past its town squares and porch columns and tables set for dinner, eerily past tobacco barns and farms, to battlefields and graveyards and shooting upward to its cottony clouds and startlingly blue, blue skies. Welty, again, 25 years ago, but why not just call it now: “We have become used to what we live with, caloused (perhaps in self-protection) to what’s happened to the world outside our door, and we now accept its worsening. But the Eggleston vision of his world is clear, and clarifying to our own.”
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