Front Porch

Figure 1.

Tom Rankin tells us that the South has long attracted some of America's finest photographers, including Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange, whose photograph of this crossroads store from 1937 in Alabama was the first image ever published in Southern Cultures, on the cover of our inaugural issue.

Southerners are famous for their stories. We have sharp, sly tales about the Rabbit and the Fox that skewer the powers that be. And hilarious family anecdotes about the time when Uncle Buford slipped his garter snake into the prayer meeting and Aunt Fannie entered the wrong jar of "preserves" at the county fair. There are tragic warnings repeated in song, like the love of Frankie and Johnny, or the wreck of the Old 97. In the opening pages of Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner evoked "the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged ghosts," who had nothing left but the power to keep telling their endless stories. All those fables get folded into southern literature, and make the South notorious for its writes and would-be writers.

So when I think of Southern Cultures, I do not usually start with pictures. The Old South supported itinerant portraitists who left us thousands of planter likenesses hanging on historic walls, and a few serious visual artists like Washington Allston, but no group as illustrious as the Hudson River School to capture southern scenery with oil and canvas. Family trunks still hold thousands of stiff daguerreotypes from before the War, capturing belles and patriarchs, toddlers and brash young men in uniforms, but the Confederacy lacked a Matthew Brady who could reflect every mood of its president or freeze the carnage of a southern battlefield. We had "modernist" authors by the score, but "modern art" in meager samples. Is there a deep cultural reason, or was it just too hard to get the needed materials, from fine oils to glass plates and chemicals? I don't know.

Yet Tom Rankin, southern photographer and director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, authors this issue's introductory essay and tells us that the South has long attracted some of America's finest photographers, including Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange. Most issues of Southern Cultures are almost all words, but this issue is mostly photographs. We've published photo essays in Southern Cultures before, but never so many at once. This time, we really want to see what southern pictures look like.

In our opening essay, Rankin muses that southern photography is about time and weather. To stretch the concept a bit, weather in the South's social and cultural environment has been stormy and distinctive, shaping us all with its droughts and deluges, heat waves and cold snaps. Time is even more poignant for southerners, especially for those who have spent so much of it recalling times past. But like time in a photograph, life in the South also seemed to stand still for so long that popular consciousness can reflect cracked daguerreotypes almost as often as a twice-told tale. We've all seen lots of southern photographs that verge on nostalgia—the fading barn in a field of weeds, the rusted truck with broken headlights. But the best photographs freeze time with more depth than the cheap pangs of nostalgia, capturing the pain as well as the wonder that wells up in the tension between our "now" and the picture's "then." And the mixture of pain and wonder is a southern specialty.

Tom Rankin is an outstanding southern photographer himself and his opening essay introduces this issue better than anyone else could do. We have found a wide range of southern images to share, from the work of small town studio operators from long ago to aching photojournalism from Katrina-scourged New Orleans. Time and weather bear heavily on them all. Look at them carefully. Perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words after all.