For this short “Snapshot” feature, photographers selected one of their photographs and wrote a short reflection on what it shows us about the ever-shifting relationship between people and place in the South.

For this short “Snapshot” feature, photographers selected one of their photographs and wrote a short reflection on what it shows us about the ever-shifting relationship between people and place in the South.

Snapshot by Lisa McCarty

This essay compares two photographs that depict two pairs of Black women. The first image is undated with subjects not identified; the second image features the late artist/architect Amaza Lee Meredith and her partner, the late educator Dr. Edna Meade Colson. As part of a reflection on travel, love, and intimacy, each photograph serves as a conduit for reckoning with the complexity of a Black southern female subjectivity, one in which queer romance and desire might be centered. Both images prompt reflection on lives lived, in some ways, beyond the legibility of normative expectations.