Two books led me to question why and how two opposing races form community: James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). This series of images asks us to consider opposing realities for each community, separated by race, and experience.
Agee and Evans examined sharecropper life in the Black Belt region of Alabama while completely ignoring the majority Black population. Their project was a blend of journalism, art, and to some degree voyeurism. Thirty-three years earlier, traveling across the same region Du Bois wrote a series of essays describing a “color line” and “veil” as metaphors for the social, cultural, and psychological separation between these Black and White communities—divisions reflected in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Despite the remarkable photography it was as if the Black community did not exist. A 100 years later these communities exist in a "news desert" where issues they confront are ignored and undocumented by local media. Like Dubois observed there remain two completely different psychological realities separated by race each forming a cultural landscape.
Photography gives the opportunity to look closer at this cultural landscape and see beyond the color line. The contrasting narratives are from the black community and an absence of acknowledgement from local media and the white community. Photography fallows me to see a community I thought I knew through a set of different eyes, both beauty and pain. The camera limits any spoken narrative and merely sees reality.
This collection of images and videos stands as testament to their continued struggle and existence.
Kenny Glasgow was the founder of the The Ordinary People Society that helped register felons to vote. Having previously served 14 years for armed robbery and then becoming a pastor in this video a "prophet " while speaking in tongues predicted the federal government would assassinate him. He was later arrested for capital murder (charges later dismissed) and while out on bond, arrested for possession of cocaine and biting a police officer. He was sent back to prison for 30 months. Despite Glasgow's chaos I witnessed him help people no one else would help. Maybe as he said "you have to be lost to see the lost".
"And the man said, They are departed hence; for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. And Joseph went after his brethren, and found them in Dothan." GENESIS 37:17
Kenneth Moffit and Chief Steve Parrish illustrate opposing narratives of the community
