Snapshots of the South
Conversations and Photographs from the American South
In the summer of 2003, my good friend, Pearl Han Ashcraft and I set out to capture the mood in the American South. Armed with a 35 mm film camera and some notebooks, our aim was to capture through the photographs and words of the people we met, the complexities, the beauty and the humor of contemporary life.
We travelled through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, loosely retracing the steps of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 book, “You Have Seen Their Faces.” We talked to farmers, politicians, school teachers, kids, social workers and activists. We met people eager to dispel the widely perceived images of white southerners who through their protests protested too much, and those who through their actions (but not necessarily their words), are fighting to bridge the many divides in southern life.
The opinions of the people we met were as varied as the southern landscape. Some will surprise you. Some will be as you predicted. One thing is for sure: the divides were still clearly marked. Schools were segregated, people were stubborn, rural life was slipping away. As for the politicians, as one black southerner put it, “all (political) candidates are good candidates until they get the job.”
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