“They warned me that I’d never get the real history the way I was going about it. They said I needed to capture the story. I listened. And I stepped on a wellspring.” January 2013, Chicago, Illinois. I was sitting in Mr. William Schaffer’s apartment conducting my survey. He was eighty-six years old at the »
“Meier told me, ‘A Man Called White is worthless, nothing but lies.’ And then he walked off, unable, apparently, to suffer fools for much more than a minute.” In 1989, I was a graduate student just beginning research on the life of the historian Rayford Logan. Perhaps best remembered for popularizing the phrase “the Nadir” »
“At eighteen years old, Mormon Elders are still developing physically and spiritually while working to share their gospel in a culture far from home.” Last year I crossed paths with Mormon missionaries who live in my apartment complex. Having been raised in the Mormon Church, I expressed interest in documenting their ministry in an effort »
“The camera became my excuse to talk to the beauty queens, fine artists, musicians, rebels, angels, and street preachers of my community.” Inside the Cat Square Superette, above the meat counter, under the garish fluorescent lights and a watercolor painting of the store, a plaque lists four decades of Cat Square mayors. Among them is »
“‘No, I don’t want my picter took. / Gwine all round in de paper and de book—/ Ever-body knowin’ des how I look.’” Hale County, Alabama. For many, the words conjure images of Allie Mae Burroughs’s face. Appearing older than her twenty- seven years, she stands before an unpainted clapboard house staring straight into Walker »
“‘This house is as old as my grandma. This house is like a junkyard. This house is like an animal in the woods. This house is as raggedy as an old car. This house is as ugly as an ugly tree.’” Like many towns in the Mississippi Delta, Tutwiler, Mississippi, is a sparsely populated community »
“So what is the truth about documentary?” Southern Cultures is deeply indebted to photographer Tom Rankin, former director of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and current head of Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, for serving as guest editor of this special issue. Rankin offers his own reflections on documentary and its meanings »
“How do we find a documentary voice that makes room for the documentary artist’s point of view and also embraces . . . those voices of local people who talk to us in ways we understand but would rather not hear?” In the days immediately following the terror in Charleston, South Carolina, and the murder »
“When people asked the stale question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?,’ I started responding: ‘The President’ . . . With ‘President,’ I never had to reply, ‘Well, sir, when I grow up I’d like to understand what compels you to ask me that question.’” At seven years old I knew »
“It must have been these stories that convinced me to go with him to a Texas gun and knife show. Camera slung to my chest, an AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his back, we walked into the Longview Civic Center.” He let himself in the house without knocking, as had become his habit, and placed »
“Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial.” Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial, citizens in a remarkable graphic menagerie that speak, sometimes forcefully, sometimes joyfully, to what he termed “hard truths.” Tigers, signifying the artist as well as »
I could not bring myself to warn Joe,doing so would cause his legs to give out,his heart collapse: you told me every life is sacred. Army of the CumberlandFebruary 5, 1862, cold and snowing Dear Father,More pitiful than packs of feral catsthe horde staggered into camp,their black faces smothered in clay,arthritic fingers mangled with dirt,echoes »