This project began with an essay written in a class taught by Carroll at the Wallace Community College's Scholars Bridge Program by Joy Brantley (see below). It served as part of Carroll's graduate thesis in Landscape Architecture at Auburn University and became a primary source for a grant application that resulted in the Let Us Go To Dothan Project (2010-2022). awarded a Zilphia P. Horton Fellowship in 2016.
Let Us Go to Dothan is a photobook about the land and people in an area on the edge of black belt in rural Alabama called the Wiregrass. Photographed over the course of a decade in one of the American South's poorest communities, this work depicts the human capacity to resist oppression and systemic racism. Carroll's work offers a novel view that the landscape itself and urban form contribute to racism reinforcing segregation. In addition to his photographs, he records oral stories of the residents he photographs ranging from lynching trees, to churches rebuilt after the Klan repeatedly burned them and the brutal beheading of a black preacher told by one of the men who participated. Amidst a backdrop of a long history of racism, economic dispossession, and societal neglect, Let Us Go to Dothan draws attention to one of worst examples of the American experiment and a refusal to come to grip with the horror black communities have experienced for generations and captures in images the beauty in the faces of hope and resilience of those opposing it.
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Digital edition will be available via Apple Books on October 1, 2025.
$125.00 THE LORD SAID LET US GO TO DOTHAN by Jon B. Carroll
11.75x14.75 inches. 148 pages. 90 tritone plates on uncoated paper. Cloth cover and foil stamp text. Page edges painted black.
