Not Even Past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

In “Photography as History in the U.S. South,” an essay that appeared in the journal Southern Cultures in 2019, University of Virginia scholar Grace Hale describes the South as a “landscape littered with evidence of the past, from plantation slavery and the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.”  It is a landscape that embodies contradictions.  “At odds,” she writes, “with the grand story of America as expanding freedoms, the region has been understood as both the national reservoir of cultural authenticity and the national cesspool of white supremacy.”  For decades those contradictions have attracted photographers, who have, in Hale’s words, turned the region into a “de facto open-air museum where . . . a material sense of the past in the present seemed to be permanently on display.”  In other words, to paraphrase Faulkner, in the South the past is never dead, it’s standing by the roadside waiting to have its picture taken.

 In these photographs I have tried to capture not only the way the past intrudes upon the present in the South but also the way the present comments on the past.