Influenced by the writings of poet-critic Charles
Baudelaire, the French Symbolists, and the art of
Surrealism, Laughlin manipulated the photographic
process and created dramatic tableaux set against
cemetery statues, antebellum plantations, mansions,
and other ‘‘lost in time’’ Southern places. His work
went largely unrecognized outside of the South until
after his death in 1985.
In the 1940s, black life in the South was becoming
of interest to photographers. Rosalie Gwathmey
(1909–2001) came back to Charlotte, North Ca-
rolina, after studying in New York to photograph
the people in her hometown and in nearby Rocky
Mount. Her graceful, unaffected images were
straightforward documentations, rather than art. A-
nother photographer working in the South was
Reverend Lonzie Odie Taylor, whose work centered
on the realities of black life in Memphis, Tennessee.
With the growth of photographic education at
the college and university level in the 1940s and
1950s in the United States, thus began an exchange
of artists and ideas. While many Southerners tra-
veled outside of the region to learn the technical
skills from well-known photographers and artists,
other artists came to the South after attending
school, most notably was Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Originally from Illinois, Ralph Eugene Meatyard
settled in Lexington, Kentucky, after studying
under Van Deren Coke, Henry Holmes Smith, and
Minor White. Working outside of the known art
circles, Meatyard began staging pictures of his
family and friends in tableaux of masked people in
seemingly normal situations. The mask became
a potent, disquieting symbol within ambiguous
and bizarre imagery interpreted as the dark South-
ern Gothic tradition. The idea and name for his
character Lucybelle Crater, featured in his posthu-
mous book,The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater
(1974), was derived from the literature of Flannery
O’Connor.
During the two years of his photographic sojourn
(1955–1957) around the United States, Robert
Frank went to various Southern cities, such as Mia-
mi, Savannah, Memphis, Charleston, New Orleans,
and Nashville. His sharply insightful observations
documented the disquieting realities of race, class,
and income, later published in his book,The Amer-
icans(1959).
In 1957, a short ten years before he became
known as a ‘‘social landscape’’ photographer, Lee
Friedlander came from New York to the South to
pursue his personal interest in jazz and to do what
became his first major body of work, a series of
portraits of New Orleans jazz musicians. During
this same time, Fonville Winans began his 20 year
project of documenting the Cajun culture in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana.
The increasing volatile social events of the Civil
Rights Era in the 1950s and 1960s drew many
photographers to the South on behalf of various
news agencies and publications. Shooting forLife
magazine, Flip Schulke (b. 1931) was dedicated to
the ideal of a just society. Schulke’s friendship with
Martin Luther King enabled him to closely record
the plight of Southern blacks. Working for the
black picture magazines, one of the few black
photojournalists present was former Kentuckian
Moneta Sleet, Jr. Sleet, whose earlier photo essays
in the 1950s centered on the people and family life
in black America, came south to document the
humanism as well as the social and political issues.
His 1968 portrait of Mrs. Coretta Scott King and
her daughter Bernice at the funeral of Martin
Luther King, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
Another black photojournalist, Charles Moore (b.
1931), photographed forLifethe turbulence and
violent demonstrations in Birmingham and Mon-
tgomery. Moore, like Sleet, realized the power of
photography to the black cause.
In Memphis, the center of the Civil Rights
Movement, Ernest C. Withers (b. 1922) used his
camera to document the day-to-day struggles and
newsworthy activities, including Martin Luther
King’s last march, ‘‘I Am A Man,’’ and the after-
math of King’s assassination. Calling his Beal
Street studio, ‘‘Pictures Tell The Story,’’ Withers
shot over five million pictures between the 1940s
and the 1970s of African American life in and
around him, producing rare images of The Negro
National Baseball League and the birth of blues,
jazz, and rock ‘n roll.
Up until this period, there had been many talented
black artists emerging from the South. Some stayed.
Many left. Some came back to revisit and document.
Others used their memories in their work. In the late
1960s, Chester Higgins, Jr. (b. 1947) came back to
his home state of Alabama to document its character
and life. A former student of Prentice H. Polk at
Tuskegee Institute, Higgins endeavored to sensitively
handle the self-respect and unification of people of
African descent. The project evolved into what be-
came a lifelong vision expanding beyond the Amer-
ican borders into the African diaspora.
There were, in addition, a growing number of
Southern photographers learning the medium and
working in isolation. Self taught in photography,
Paul Kwilecki (b. 1928) decided to begin docu-
menting what he knew best—Bainbridge, Georgia
and the surrounding Decatur County—where he
lived. Devoid of any pretentiousness, Kwilecki’sUNITED STATES: THE SOUTH, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE