roots or for a simpler time and place. Employing
nineteenth century photographic processes, Willie
Ann Wright recontextualized the historical South
into the present by looking at the increasing phe-
nomena of those seeking to recreate an ideal past in
Civil War reenactments. Discovering forgotten or
abandoned landscapes, Nancy Marshall enhanced
the mystery of each place through the platinum-
palladium process. Set against the indigenous vege-
tation of her garden in coastal South Carolina,
Elizabeth Turk’s portraits investigate the transfor-
mative aspect of time upon her family and friends.
Nic Nicosia’s balanced portrait commissions in
Dallas and Houston manifest the middle ground
between the old and new South. Studying a group
of ladies at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Julie
Moos discovered the paradoxical beauty of their
passion for large decorative hats. Karekin Goek-
jian has looked deeply into the spiritual aspects of
Southern ‘‘outsider’’ artists to visually translate his
findings in their portraits. Inspired by contempor-
ary Southern literature and the tintype process,
Deborah Luster lends a timeless quality to the
portraits of inmates at three Louisiana prisons.
Planning and developing visual projects, photo-
graphers such as William Greiner (Homefrontser-
ies, 1994), Mark Steinmetz (At the Edge of the City
series, 1992), Eric Breitenbach (Photographs from
Florida series, 1989–1994), Thomas Tulis (Con-
struction of,Suburbia and Aspects of New Roads
Chattanooga series, 1991–1995), Ruth Dusseault
(The Atlantic Steel Project, ongoing series), Benita
Carr (Gretch, 1999), and Mitch Epstein (Vietnam in
Versaillesseries, 1992–1995) have looked closely at
the culture of the Contemporary South. In a similar
documentary style, Melissa Springer has realisti-
cally depicted the difficult lives of mothers in a
prison in Alabama. Ken Hassell, in North Carolina,
photographed the diminishing use of human labor
as the industrial South rapidly moved toward the
electronic and service-oriented age. David Najjab,
an Arab Muslim born in Dallas, has photographed
a dimension of the South’s changing ethnicity.
Through his documentary books on children with
cancer, people with AIDS, and those who are phy-
sically challenged, Billy Howard wants to be a
visual voice for those without a voice.
Focusing on the sociological implications, pho-
tographer and writer, Alex Harris, worked with
Robert Coles on several books. Together in 1995,
Harris and Coles founded DoubleTake, a photo-
graphic and literary journal, with the support of
the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke Uni-
versity, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. More aca-
demic in approach, the periodical used image/text
combinations, alongside literature, to look at the
deeper significance of the visuals.
There have been those who have followed in the
aesthetic footsteps of earlier Southern photogra-
phers. Richard Sexton, an architectural photogra-
pher in New Orleans, has studied the design
elements in Clarence John Laughlin’s antebellum
world. In Tennessee, Mike Smith photographed
with a comparable poetic vision to the beauty
within William Christenberry’s Hale County work.
For others, life in states, such as Mississippi,
Alabama, and Louisiana, exemplify the true rich-
ness of the Southern landscape. In and around
Charleston has been the subject of Bill Weems’s
works. John D. Lawrence’s photographic book on
William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, trans-
cended time and takes the viewer back. Likewise,
Tom Rankin saw himself as a folklorist/ethnogra-
pher as he traveled the Mississippi Delta and
visually explored the religious sacred spaces from
the past. The connection between his native soil in
the Delta region and its people continued to fasci-
nate photographers such as Jack Spencer. Concen-
trating on the larger spiritual truths about life and
death, Conne Thalken has documented alligator
harvesting in the remote coastal areas of southwes-
tern Louisiana.
Sites of leisure permit the photographer and
viewer to take refuge from the fast pace of contem-
porary times. Sentimentality and the game of base-
ball as it prides itself on past events was the subject
of Charlie McCuller’s work. Spending her nights in
jazz clubs, Atlantan Shelia Turner documented the
smoky, dark spaces where the music moves until
the early morning hours.
Working as freelance photographers, many dedi-
cated themselves to the discourse on environmental
issues in the South, centering upon the dichotomy
inherent in a culture where the land is seen as both
cherished and expendable. Kathryn Kolb devotes
her personal work to help two environmental
groups devoted to halting the deforestation of
Georgia. Concerned also with our treatment of
the land, Tom Meyer in Atlanta sees his work as
a record of the sorrow in places once worthy of
being a postcard. Commissioned by the High Mu-
seum of Art in 1996, Richard Misrach risked his
health while documenting the toxic effects of the
industry along the Mississippi River in the series
Cancer Alley.
New to the Southern art scene has been the
influx of Hispanic artists, many of them Cuban
exiles, living and working in the region. Seeing
with new eyes a land they now call home, many
noted the artistic influences as well as the fast paceUNITED STATES: THE SOUTH, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE