industrial work. Fine art photography was prac-
ticed as a hobby. Due to proximity to well-estab-
lished trade routes and ports, a few Southern cities
were able to provide enough activity to support the
business of photography, particularly in Alabama,
Louisiana, and Georgia. Oscar V. Hunt (1881–
1962) in Birmingham, Alabama, documented the
city’s building spurts, while also experimenting
with aerial photography. The Russell Brothers
(William and Samuel) operated a portrait business
in Anniston from 1883 to 1940, creating some of
the most telling images of life at that time. Support-
ing themselves with business from the wealthier
clientele, the brothers were able to also provide
portraiture for the middle and working classes. In
Mobile, Erik Overbey (1882–1977), apart from his
portrait business, did panoramic views of quietly
composed landscapes. An amateur photographer,
Robert Hudson (1885–1973) used his skills to make
views of his town, Demopolis, and the community
events. Having studied the light upon subject mat-
ter and modernist compositions in photographs by
the ‘‘masters’’ featured in mail order magazines,
Draffus Lamar Hightower (1899–1993) practiced
what he learned by photographing life in Clayton,
Alabama, and the surrounding Barbour County.
A growing national curiosity in the regional
character of the South led Rudolph Eickemeyer,
Jr. (1862–1932) to travel from Pennsylvania to
Montgomery County to photograph rural life in
Alabama, 40 of which were published in 1900 in
the book,Down South.
Working as a commercial photographer in New
Orleans, Louisiana, from about 1895 to 1940, E. J.
Bellocq (1873–1949) spent his free time creating
compelling portraits of the prostitutes in the red
light district, Storeyville. Not much is known about
Bellocq nor why he did this work. He was also
rumored to have made photographs of the inhabi-
tants of the opium dens in the city’s Chinatown, of
which there are no known prints. Eighty-nine gela-
tin dry-plate glass negatives of the prostitutes were
found in an antique desk in the 1960s and pur-
chased by photographer Lee Friedlander. Friedlan-
der preserved the badly damaged negatives, created
platinum palladium prints from them, and in 1970,
produced a book of Bellocq’s images.
Another of the early fine art photographers was
Edgerton Garvin, working in Georgia between
1910–1940. His soft-focus, pictorially influenced
platinum prints showed the untouched beauty of
the nature and landscape in the coastal areas of
Savannah, Georgia, and northern Florida.
For African Americans living in the South where
there was no written history, after the Civil War
photography emerged as an important supplement
to oral traditions. And because obtaining equality
in educational opportunities was still a struggle,
mentorship for African Americans became a way
to help each other. As the century progressed, the
Tuskegee Institute’s photography division in Ala-
bama played a significant part in the early photo-
graphic identity of the South. Following in the
steps of his mentor, photographer Cornelius M.
Battey (1873–1927), Prentice H. Polk (1898–1985)
photographed in and around Tuskegee Institute
for over 60 years. He began as a student in paint-
ing, left briefly, and then returned to open his
studio nearby. The following year he joined the
Institute’s faculty and from 1939 until his death
in 1985 served as the Tuskegee Institute’s official
photographer. His photographs, portraits of both
his professional colleagues including his famous
images of George Washington Carver and what
constituted the black rural community around the
Institute, documented the emerging black middle
class with respect and sensitivity.
Other African American photographers, like Ri-
chard S. Roberts (1881–1936) in Columbia, South
Carolina, quietly worked in isolation, documenting
a life of segregation and leaving evidence of the fail-
ures of Reconstruction and Progressive reforms.
For reasons other than fine art photographic prac-
tice, photographers came to the South to pho-
tograph, particularly on behalf of Progressive
reforms, in the early 1900s. In 1903 and in 1906,
the president of Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington,
invited Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) in
Washington, D.C. to document the school’s progress
and exhibitions. From 1911–1914, on behalf of the
National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine
(1874–1940) visited and photographed the working
children in Alabama’s factories and cotton fields.
Still recovering from the trauma of the Civil
War, the Southern arts culture, once called the
‘‘Sahara of the Beaux Arts’’ by H.L. Mencken,
did not really begin to thrive until the Southern
literary renaissance in the 1920s, producing what
was probably the most significant body of litera-
ture in American history. The influential tie-in is
strong between the works of writers, such as Flan-
nery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Carson McCul-
lers, and Eudora Welty, and the photographic arts.
Written descriptions of Southern life and social
customs were rooted in the past. Literary themes
of loss, nostalgia, ruin, and remembrance have
since been translated and constructed into the
visual photographic perception of the South.
Interest in Southern life grew after the literary
renaissance. After 1927 and in the early 1930s,UNITED STATES: THE SOUTH, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE