Three Cousins, Abbeville, Alabama, 2005
Three 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) and Frederick Law Olmsted's A Journey in the Backcountry (1860) . 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. Their project 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. DuBois had read the succinct description of the physical landscape of the black belt region by Olmsted on the eve of the Civil War and understood the condition of slaves before emancipation. Despite the remarkable photography of Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men it was as if the Black community did not exist. A 100 years later the descendants of these communities, now having migrated to town, exist in a "news desert" where issues confronted are ignored and undocumented. Like Dubois observed, there remain two completely different psychological realities separated by race each forming the cultural landscape.
Photography gave me opportunity to look closer at this cultural landscape and see beyond the color line which I argue still exists. The contrasting narratives from the black community and an absence of acknowledgement from local media and the white community fuel conflict. Photography allows us to see a community through a set of different eyes, both beauty and pain.
This collection of images and videos stands as testament to their continued struggle and existence.
WEB DuBois idea of landscape, Auburn University, Alabama
"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. As much as Chief Steve Parrish attempted to personalize this and direct attention to me in some effort to discredit, I was just a guy taking photographs and had no opinion as to who was right or wrong. My interest was illustrating the phenomena DuBois observed where two completely different realties in the same place that were separated by race.
