photographs, published inUnderstandings(1981)
are about the middle class, those whom Flannery
O’Connor described as ‘‘having ordinary lives.’’
Each of Kwilecki’s series was the result of six
months to a year spent visually noting the charac-
teristics of a specific function, group, or place.
The 1960s was a time of transition for Southern
artists. A growing awareness, through magazines
and journals, of the value of upper education
pushed many Southerners to leave the region to
study under known masters of photography. While
earning his M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of
Design under the guidance of Harry Callahan and
Aaron Siskind, Emmet Gowin often returned to his
birthplace in Danville, West Virginia. Looking in-
ward toward his own personal iconography, Gow-
in’s extended portraits of his wife, Edith, and later of
their children, have been positioned within the tradi-
tion of Southern domestic irony.
The printmaking tradition was thriving in Flor-
ida in the work of Evon Streetman (b. 1932) and
Jerry Uelsmann. Uelsmann, after having studied
with Minor White, Ralph Hattersley, and Henry
Holmes Smith, returned to the South to teach at
the University of Florida—Gainesville. Fusing rea-
lity and fantasy by combination printing, later
through the computer, Uelsmann’s images display
the same Surrealistic tendencies seen in the work of
Clarence John Laughlin, one of the influences on
Uelsmann’s work.
Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, William Christen-
berry did not discover until 1960—nearly two years
after he first picked up a camera—that in 1936,
Walker Evans had photographed some of his most
famous images in nearby Hale County. Christen-
berry began re-photographing those same buildings
and sites, using Agee’s words as descriptive guides.
As William Faulkner once proposed about seeking
one’s own ‘‘little postage stamp of nature soil,’’
Christenberry’s images captured the unique charac-
ter and passage of time, the strange and the beautiful,
of a small specific Southern place, whether it be an
old mailbox, an abandoned house nearly submerged
in kudzu, a peculiar handmade grave marker, or the
continued presence of Confederate icons.
During the time of the 1970s when photography
was becoming acknowledged as an art form, and
simultaneously more collectible, the attention of
the world was drawn to an exhibition of William
Eggleston’s color work at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York in 1976. Not only was this work
at the forefront of color photography as being
aesthetically acceptable, his images of the South
portrayed an ordinariness with richness and depth
beyond the predominant mythology about the
South. The realness of the South came through
Eggleston’s lens, with everyday life in the Missis-
sippi Delta, Memphis, and other commonplace
areas held together with history, memory, and
romance. The fact that he was a Southerner by
birth and chose to continue to live in Memphis
was irrelevant to the acclaim due him. Eggleston’s
cool, descriptive color combined with the un-extra-
ordinary subject matter influenced generations of
new photographers, inside and outside the South.
His approach segued aesthetic discussions about
color, rather than about the subject matter, the
South. New attention was given to the potential
of photography created by those working in the
South and to the place.
With the entrance of color photography into the
visual vocabulary of artists, young photographers,
like Stephen Shore, now looked with new eyes at
places in the South. Shore, inspired by the postcard
genre, in 1971 went to Amarillo, Texas, choosing
principal places of interest to become hisTall in
Texasproject.
While interest in the Southern landscape grew,
some of the newly educated photographers sought
out the New South; others sought out the Old
South. Danny Lyon documented the social margin-
alization and wasted lives of the male prisoners in
Texas prisons. In Tulsa, Larry Clark used his cam-
era to tell the stories of his friends whose lives were
caught up in the mindless destruction of drugs.
Shelby Lee Adams (b. 1950), a native of Howard,
Kentucky, during his summer breaks from teach-
ing, wandered the mountains of Appalachia to doc-
ument the isolated communities living in poverty.
In the late 1970s, Ron Ambrey discovered and
began documenting the rural mountain culture of
Madison County, North Carolina, noting its way of
life and the impact of rapidly built superhighways.
Throughout the South, small groups of photogra-
phers formed support systems. Encouraged by the
growing acquisition of photography by regional
museums, in 1973 a non-profit photographic gallery,
Nexus, was formed in Atlanta by a group of local
student photographers (Bill Brown, Jim Frazer, Jack
Frost,DeidreMurphy,andMichaelReagan),under
the tutelage of their instructor at Georgia State Uni-
versity, John McWilliams. The following year Nexus
organizedThe Southern Ethic Show, a juried exhibi-
tion designed to present the ‘‘Southern School’’
photographic visions of those living and working in
the Southern states, accompanied by a catalogue
written by A.D. Coleman, who at that time was the
art critic for theThe New York TimesandVillage
Voice.The cooperative then created Nexus Press, an
artmaking tool for the organization.UNITED STATES: THE SOUTH, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE