“To be southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.”
TO BE AN IMAGE that regards the historic South’s impression. To be an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, a memory … of that physical and nonphysical region. To feel of the South, and southern, like an accent can. To ring the southern bell. Gonggg. To be like infrared, resonating below the Mason–Dixon Line.
Perception: To be a picture of the American South. To be extrajudicial, and lean southern.
To have the South in your bones. To be invisibly skeletal. To organize a scarecrow’s effects and feel southern, like a southern meal. To be all the South can be. Or not be, what the South is not. To be portable like the South, the mythology’s international railroad. To be southern bound, directionally speaking. To be southern bound again, in heritage, glass, leather, or sauce. To be sketched by southern drawls, like echolocation (in a darkness satin, literary, and timeless). To be one of the cardinal directions of the Western world, logic. To not smell of the South but evoke a southern odor.
Like, Gaaawwdddd damn! You smell that?
to hint and hush in bits of yesterday
to be a frame of southern architecture and baptize the offspring of the old
country’s rationale
to be of bonkers democracy and make a stooge of silence to propagate a multiverse
in the minds of children.
to have materialized a people’s identity to look me dead in the eye
To remake the South familiar, like a William Christenberry image, in the slangless, southern vim. To magnetize the road-trip romanticism of sentiment in old things. To be window and grave. And lap the shores of Atlantis. To be its own southern language and allegorically, give down the country. To be southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.
To be America’s domestic foreigner. To be the Cheshire cat’s grin.
Critique: To polish the South’s veneers. And spark serotonin (as a defense mechanism against visibility). To be guilty by association, and the master of equanimity. To be inside, the inside of the text, without contemporaries or a bead of sweat. To be a photo-place of the American South.
to silence the veld’s hymns and bow out of moral guidance
to laugh, not cry, and laugh and laugh then cry
to treat Blackness like portraiture to treat Whiteness like light
to fetishize the icon, and know when it’s high noon
to be rooted in the past as a shadow, while under the future
to hide in plain sight and attract the thrift store art collector to
be full-stop lyrical and gild the canon and overexpose the person
in order to underexpose the person with a sanitized South
in kind with the dirty South in mind
Judgement: To be a photograph of the American South—i.e., sluggish outside of theme—i.e., prefer a formalist author—i.e., reward an arrested bed frame or an object’s suspension or an abandoned, historized car, with dopamine. To be revue.
To point with a Christian choir and on one’s tiptoes, to avoid making sounds. To look everywhere but down and in, and down, and in. To prefer genre monogamy and love the southern daze.
to prefer depiction to discovery, tradition to innovation, sharpness to
intractability to be an iceberg that is only photogenic above water
to be right-brain humanism left-brain landscape
to have an executive function talking about heaven and serpents and
eschatology to have never taken off one’s clothes
to shroud an ongoing state of piloerection
to have forgotten the tan (a body like silk and a tongue tied longways)
to prefer aestheticizing flora and fauna (including humans!), with deadpan,
euphemistic vibrancy
to consider the avant-garde-anything malintent
To be paradigmatic of absence and presence; presence in absence, absence in presence; of the southern photograph’s Matryoshka doll spiritual sociality. To get the southern picture and know only before the horizon, behind the time, from a tree saddle, with a sky beam to blind and guide the premonitions of the approaching now. To get the southern picture and turn the southern cheek. To be emotionally southern and think of therapy as kryptonite.
To be all the South can be, because of what it wasn’t.
Aim: To be a photographic artifact of the southern United States. To be material memory, like a scratch and sniff. Or binary-coded memory, able to tip the literal scale. To be southern matter, in alchemy, value, or otherwise. To start from the bottom and now be here, and to always have family in the Black Belt. To have listened closely to the South, and derived legibility from its light. To be a free-willed photograph of the American South, rare and pure black, brown, soil and mud. And dance and jazz and riddle and electrocute and blow smoke with semiotics, despite the surface tension of an uphill battle and the iron core of the good ole boy’s gravity.
To get the southern picture. And turn back the other cheek. To peer into time’s Tetris and fortuitously trace the end of the rainbow to South Africa; and find then, at both ends, a protovisuality. To escape Aunt Jemima’s syrup through the help of Polaris, and return, star studded, after ceaseless cosmic showers, to say:
pardon, pardon, pardon me,
a rhizome from your suffrage i got the picture
Personal Approach: To be so hungry for self as to eat the picture of the South. And eat the Giving Tree, its strange fruit, every mailbox and road sign from Texas to Maryland, and even eat the honorable hand that fed, a mouth in a southern photo-genetic chewing motion. To use the excrement for a permanent installation in the archive of the Library of Congress. To then consider the installation fertilizer for a new body of southern images.
Possibility: To be a photograph of the American South and be liberated, having known death.
This essay was first published in Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund, edited by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll (University of Georgia Press/Georgia Museum of Art, 2022), alongside an exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art.
RaMell Ross, an artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian, has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and a USA Artist Fellowship. His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar.
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