Photography & Art
Southern Cultures has published many photo essays over the last decade, as well as numerous essays and features with a focus on Photography & Art, including special issues devoted entirely to Photography in 2007 and 2011.
Our full catalog of our Photography & Art material is below, with direct links to each photo essay and feature in its entirety in the Project Muse digital library, as well as links to $0.99 Kindle and Nook downloads for each of our most recent articles. Included is material we've just posted here for the first time: reviews of works on Photography and Art.
To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America
by Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis with photographs by Billy E. Barnes
reviewed by Michael K. Honey
"With poverty and unemployment at levels unprecedented since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as wages of those with jobs stagnate, as the federal government spends trillions for war and gives tax and bailout subsidies to the ultra-rich, we should be asking ourselves how it got to be this way and what can we do about it. To Right These Wrongs provides many of the answers."
Full Issue for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader
Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Native Ground
photographs by Rob McDonald
"If convention has it right, these are writers who bear something close to a genetic predisposition to produce a literature suffused with place."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Backstage Stories: Wonders, Relics, and a Beer Fridge
photographs by Daniel Coston
and tales from the artists themselves
"The headlining band were nasty rogues, hitting on freakishly skinny underage chicks while I heard it all half asleep."
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Full Issue for Kindle ($4.95 with embedded tracks), for Nook ($4.95, CD shipped separately), or for Sony Reader ($5.88, CD shipped separately)
Southern Cultures Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011: Music
The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious
by Tom Rankin, Guest Editor
William Eggleston is the point of entry for this preview of the 2011 Photography issue, an introduction that includes striking photographs from Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange, too. Guest Editor Tom Rankin also explores the stunning work of Paul Kwilecki.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
American Studies
photography by Michael Carlebach
So often we see photographs of a humorless South, but Michael Carlebach reminds us to smile at ourselves.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
Mapping The Democratic Forest:
The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston
by Ben Child
with full-color photographs by William Eggleston
Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
Stereo Propaganda
featuring full-color mixed media by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier
Old photographs meet new color, creating thoughtful new meanings.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
"Those little color snapshots": William Christenberry
interviewed by William R. Ferris
featuring full-color photographs by William Christenberry
Follow the evolution of the vision and career of one of the South's foremost photographers as he tells his story in his own words.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp:
Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith
by Dolores Flamiano
featuring the original Life photographs
(Due to copyright restrictions, the original Life photos are available in the print edition only.)
Two mid-century LIFE photo essays reveal the power of editorial selection to lie--or reveal truth.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
Women Working
photography and interviews by Susan Harbage Page
When Susan Harbage Page worked in the early seventies alongside the women in this photo essay, in addition to friendships she also made a poignant record:"‘Rough. It is rough being a female.'"
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
The Day Is Past and Gone: Family Photographs from Eastern North Carolina
by Scott Matthews
Part essay, part memory--this piece finds the perfect form to explore those pictures that might rely most for meaning on the stories that accompany them: family photos.
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
Home of the Double-Headed Eagle
The Visionary Vernacular Architecture of Reverend H. D. Dennis and Margaret Dennis
by Ali Colleen Neff
"In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passersby."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
The Legend Catcher: Rarities from the Collection of Photographer Dick Waterman
"The backstage Dylan—dutifully practicing with harmonica and guitar—wouldn't have predicted a portfolio that would include forty-five more albums."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV
Longing: Personal Effects from the Border
photographs by Susan Harbage Page
with an introduction by Bernard L. Herman
“Images of a deflated inner tube dropped by the road, a wallet mired, with its contents spilling into the mud, footsteps revealed in soft earth, and river-wet clothes wrung, wadded, and cast aside document ordinary things possessed with extraordinary associations of flight, hope, panic, determination, and fear.”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010
“Photograph, 1983” and “Sandbagging"
poems by Rachel Richardson
“The warden says fill
and you fill it.”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010
Chance Meetings and Back Roads: Making Connections through Food
photographs by Amy C. Evans
"He was forced into retirement after Hurricane Katrina, but 'The Professor,' as he's known, is still a walking encyclopedia of New Orleans cocktail history."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Winston-Salem Blues: Captain Luke, Macavine Hayes, and Whistlin' Britches
photographs by Joanna Welborn
"A round of 'chicken,' or moonshine, was ordered, and Macavine and Whistlin' Britches were one-upping each other with insults and dirty jokes. Captain Luke played it cool in the corner, sipping a can of Natural Light and smoking a cigar."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III
Lessons of Core Sound Workboats
photographs by Lawrence S. Earley
"Peering across the sound in the twilight, a fisherman quickly knows who is anchored for the night or heading to shore. He reads another boat by the pattern of its lights, the design of its pilot house, the lift of its stern, the shape of its bow."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009
"Time to Appreciate": The Mississippi Delta Region, 1994–2002
photographs by Bruce J. West
"A lush and exotic landscape—a setting encouraging and supporting heroic transformation—nurtures all endeavors."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009
Glimpses of a Nearby Nation: The Making of Catawba Pottery with Georgia Harris and Edith Harris Brown
by Lorene B. Harris
with photographs by Thomas J. Blumer
and with an introduction by Brett H. Riggs
"Like their ancestors for thousands of years, Catawba potters of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued to adapt their material traditions to ever-changing modern contexts. In the process, they create remarkably contemporary works of visual and tactile art."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: Southern Lives
What was Found
by Maura Fitzgerald
"You'll wait in this city where they bury their dead and their Mardi Gras floats above ground. And there you'll rest next to a bust of a Saints quarterback, the last Viking king, a painted foam Tin Man and his oversized heart. And for an epitaph, a sign on a far wall to state the obvious: . . . the stuff dreams are made of."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008: Katrina
HumaNatureScapes
photography by Keri McLeod
"I shot primarily under low light, which allowed mystery to sink into each image and space."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
The Injuries of Time and Weather
by Tom Rankin
“Photographs in the South have reflected the patterns and vicissitudes of the weather, both climatic and social-political, throughout our history. And no region’s photographic tradition has been more engaged in, maybe even obsessed with, exploring and reflecting the injuries and scars of time—brought on more specifically by war, bondage, discrimination, class conflicts, and the ravages of nature, to name a few forces—than photography in the American South.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
Walker Evans, 1974
interviewed by William R. Ferris
“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.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town:
The ‘Modest Aspiration and Small Renown’ of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915–1960
by Berkley Hudson
“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 and Columbus native son playwright Tennessee Williams, the parents of celebrated writer Truman Capote.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
Sam F. Vance, Jr., “Character-Taker”:
The Faces of Small-Town and Rural North Carolina, 1930s–1940s
by Rah Bickley
“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.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
Hanging on and Holding out in New Orleans after Katrina
photographs and narratives by Thomas Neff
with an introduction by Moira Crone
“‘You’d better turn on CNN; looks like your house is on fire.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
Death Row in Texas and the Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas
by Bruce Jackson
“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 inside.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
Huddle Brothers; Ivanhoe, Virginia; Circa 1963
poetry by David Huddle
“. . . someone picks up
a snapshot and says, just before
tossing it to oblivion, ‘My god,
who are these quaint people?’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
Kure Beach to Asheville: Snapshots from North Carolina's I-40 Corridor
by Gyoung-Youl Jeong
"The South, of course, is not what it once was."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Lacy Charm in Old Mobile: The Historic Cast Iron of Alabama's First City
by John Sledge
photography by Sheila Hagler
"Virtually every American city accessible by water had some ornamental cast iron, but it was nowhere more exuberantly employed than in the Deep South."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Tobacco's Civil War: Images of the Sectional Conflict on Tobacco Package Labels
by Paul D. H. Quigley
"'All decked out in tobacco leaves,' the caption read, 'she might be aptly termed Miss Venus.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
Fat Tuesday at Dixie's: Jack Robinson's New Orleans Mardi Gras Photographs, 1952–1955
by Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman
"Shaw became national news in 1969, when District Attorney Jim Garrison accused him of leading a circle of gay men from New Orleans who, Garrison was convinced, orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Forty Years after the War on Poverty
Billy E. Barnes, interviewed by Elizabeth Gritter
"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."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005
Keepers of the Southern Byways
by Brian Jolley
"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."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina (review)
Catherine W. Bishir, Michael T. Southern, and Jennifer F. Martin
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Western North Carolina (review)
Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina (review)
all reviewed by William S. Price Jr.
"Among the pieces of progressive legislation that marked the early years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
Jazz Funeral: A Living Tradition
by Angelo P. Coclanis and Peter A. Coclanis
"On a sweaty Saturday morning in late October 2004, a jazz funeral was held in New Orleans. Lloyd Washington had performed off and on in the postwar period in one of the many groups known as the Ink Spots that grew out of the original 1930s group of that name."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
Rebels in the Wake of 9-11
: Homecoming Weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, October 2001
by Katy Vinroot O’Brien
“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.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005
Anatomy of a Quilt
: The Gee’s Bend Freedom Quilting Bee
by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
“Something akin to a bitter culture war took place each time I would bring out a sample of those decidedly un-Yankee Gee’s Bend quilts. ‘They don’t look right,’ we were told. ‘Who would want to sleep under something like this?’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004
Shellburne Thurber’s Southern Home
by Lee Zacharias
“‘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.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004
Rob Amberg
Sodom Laurel Album (review)
reviewed by Cary Fowler
“How unusual these days to hold a book whose size, layout, typeface--everything down to the texture of the hardcover (reminiscent of old photo and record albums)--has been thought through and woven together with such craftsmanship.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
Henry Clay Anderson
Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (review)
reviewed by Todd J. Moye
“Wedding couples beam. Bathing beauties strut their stuff. A homecoming queen waves from the back of a convertible. A couple of motorcycle riders simply show off in one of the most evocative portraits I have ever seen.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
“All Wrought Up”:
The Apocalyptic South of McKendree Robbins Long
by Lee Smith and Hal Crowther
with a poem by Robert Hill Long
“We often had dates for the revival, since there wasn’t anything else to do in that town, or anyplace else to go, and that oftentimes your date would be holding your hand while you both got all wrought up together. So there was a sexual thing going on there, too.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
April—Deep South
photographs by Phillip Goetzinger
"This amazing scenario—this land in flux—was the impetus for my journey south."
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
Images of African Americans in Southern Painting, 1840-1940
by A. Everette James
“Southern paintings showed African Americans as largely dehumanized caricatures, black stereotypes rather than distinct individuals.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
The Dying Art of Deer-Driving in the South Carolina Low Country
photography by Elena Strauch
"These images chronicle a century of tradition."
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts
Paradox in Paradise
photography by Lea Barton
"I was born in Yazoo City at the edge of the Mississippi Delta in 1956, the year Elvis Presley made his television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show but was shown only from the waist up."
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography
The Great Deluge: A Chronicle of the Aftermath of Hurricane Floyd
as told to Charles D. Thompson Jr.
with photographs by Rob Amberg
"We were behind one another praying to get out of that water."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2001: Environment
“Welcome to Misery”
photographs by Dan Sears
“Sears has found the only region where misery is a state of mind and a seaside dock, where a gravestone will mark both a lifetime and a locality simply with a sentimental ‘here,’ and where even horses know better than northerners how to avoid summer heat.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2001: Environment
Southern Scenes
photography by Dan Sears
"So far Dan Sears has ‘logged over 1300 miles,' and he has found some of the most artfully crafted images we've ever published."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 2000
Signs of the South
Original and Archival Photographs
collected by Charlie Curtis
"What could a former fashion photographer possibly have to offer Southern Cultures?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000
Kristen M. Smith's
The Lines Are Drawn
Political Cartoons of the Civil War
reviewed by Stephen W. Berry
"Would we love Lincoln so well had his soul been trapped in a more gainly form?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000
Richard B. McCaslin's
Portraits of Conflict
A Photographic History of North Carolina in the Civil War
reviewed by William Harris
"This attractive and well-designed photographic history fulfills in admirable fashion Richard McCaslin's objective: ‘to present a carefully selected array of images that convey the experience of many citizens of the North State' during the Civil War."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000
Equine Relics of the Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust
"Wounded fourteen times in all, Old Baldy was lucky to have a carcass left to be stuffed."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: Fifth Anniversary
Images of Scottsboro
by Lynn Barstis Williams
"‘Go to Alabama and you better watch out.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: Fifth Anniversary
Richard J. Powell and Jock Reynolds's
To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Patti Carr Black's
Art in Mississippi: 1720-1980
reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
"The art of the South has, until recently, been terra incognita."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
King of the One-String
by Fetzer Mills Jr., photographs by Tom Rankin
Author and photographer team up to show and tell just what a diddley-bow can do.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Yoknapatawpha: Images and Voices
by George G. Stewart
Haunting photographs from Mississippi evoke William Faulkner's mythical landscape.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1998
When Mail Was Armor: Envelopes of the Great Rebellion, 1861-1865
by Stephen W. Berry
Images on Civil War envelopes reveal a previously overlooked battleground.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1998
Alex Harris, editor
A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South
reviewed by Alex Albright
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1998: Politics
Rhapsodies in Black
an exhibition reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1998: Politics
Bringin' It All Back Home
photo essay by Roland L. Freeman, with additional photos by Robert T. Jones, Sr.
Twenty years of the Mississippi Delta Blues.
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
The Store of Joys
North Carolina Museum of Art
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Thomas Hart Benton and the Thresholds of Expression
by Robert Morgan
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
The Goal of a Realist
by Doris Betts
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
The Landscape of Louis Rémy Mignot, a Southern Painter Abroad
catalogue and exhibition
by Katherine E. Manthore, with John Coffey
reviewed by Peter H. Wood
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present
by Alice Rae Yelen, editor
reviewed by Anne L. McClanan
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Porch-Sitting as a Creative Southern Tradition
by Trudier Harris, photographs by Roland L. Freeman
Front porch-sitting is not what it used to be, but some traditions need preserving.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue
Graphic Arts and the South: Proceedings of the 1990 North American Print Conference
Judy L. Larson and Cynthia Payne, editors
reviewed by Leo Mazow
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995
The Life of a Southerner (in Drawings): An Interview with Jesse Whitaker
by Gretchen Givens
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995
Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida
by Michael Carlebach and Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., editors
reviewed by Augustus Burns
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
Images of the South: Constructing a Regional Culture on Film and Video
by Karl G. Heider, editor
reviewed by Ruth A. Banes
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta
by Tom Rankin
reviewed by Susan Kidd
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
A Southern Collection: Select Works from a Permanent Collection of Painting in the South Prepared for the Opening of the Morris Museum
by Estill Curtis Pennington
reviewed by Carolina Mesrobian Hickman
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
Pioneer Commercial Photography: The Burgert Brothers of Tampa, Florida
by Robert E. Snyder and Jack B. Moore
reviewed by Jim Carnes
Southern Cultures, The Inaugural Issue, 1993
Equal before the Lens: Jno. Trlica's Photographs of Granger, Texas
by Barbara McCandless
reviewed by Jim Carnes
Southern Cultures, The Inaugural Issue, 1993