Primitive myths: photography and the American South.

Regionalism in photography can be thought of in two different ways. The first is the notion of regional "schools," two examples being the Chicago school associated with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Illinois Institute of Design in the 1950s and the Southern Californian group formed around Robert Heinecken at the University of California, Los Angeles in the 1970s. The proximity of artists to one another often encourages a speculative mapping of influences. Although such an approach can show differences rather than similarities among artists, positing a regional "school" or "tendency" remains a common organizing principle for exhibitions, conferences and books. As this understanding of regionalism often promotes a kind of collective impulse, however ill-defined, it clearly does not require the issue of place - as a common concern of the work itself - in order to produce a viable grouping. Without establishing too rigid a dichotomy between the two, a second conception of regionalism might then be established: a regionalism that does take place as its primary concern, understood more in terms of its subject matter than the regional "school" to which it might belong. In this regionalism, place is the governing term.

This second understanding informs Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present, a 1996 exhibition and book organized by Ellen Dugan. In the collection, one finds a regionalism that sometimes presages and very often profits from the inheritance of, for instance, Walker Evans's itinerant photography. It is a regionalism that puts more emphasis on the photographer going to a place, even if this means down the block, rather than coming from one - a regionalism haunted by the ethnographic spirit of '30s documentary work. Simply put, as the title suggests, Picturing the South promotes that regionalism which, as far as content is concerned, gives primacy to place. Another recent book, Alex Harris's anthology A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South, while quite different in its avowed intentions, participates in this same regionalist tendency, albeit in a somewhat different manner.

In looking through the two volumes, it becomes apparent that this second regionalism, that not of geographically situated "schools" but of an explicit and primary interest in the specificities of place, has come to be associated with photographs of the South in particular. While images of the West have often been absorbed both into discussions of landscape, in which the issue of place is often in a losing contest with aesthetic questions,(1) and into discussions of the ideological work that art performs in relation to land rights, images of the South often remain more narrowly shackled to the simple fact of referentiality, which is to say, place. Perhaps because they can become the keyhole through which the almost mystical light of popular fantasies surrounding the South might shine, photographs of the South are rarely allowed to speak of anything so much as from where they came, even when, as in the case of many photographs from A New Life, it is merely the directing nature of a volume's title that makes region the issue at hand. As the issue of place is insistently imposed on photographs of the South, they are seen, in a reciprocal action, to embody regionalism itself. The potential elasticity of the term "regionalism" finally, and paradoxically, results in something quite unlike an arbitrary collection of photographs from all corners of the map. The South emerges as a place of particular fascination, even obsession - the subject par excellence of a regionalist project. How this came to be is a question worth exploring.

In thinking through this preeminence given the South in relation to what I've isolated as a second regionalism, one cannot ignore the impact of such popular books as Alexander Gardner's Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell's Have You Seen Their Faces (1937), Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and William Christenberry's Southern Views (1982). If there is a collective fascination with the South, this fascination has been managed and cultivated by such texts. By the time of the publication of Eggleston's collection of color photographs, for instance, the insistent coupling of regionalism in general with the South in particular seemed to lead to an impasse at which any picture of the South would remain as much a regionalist document as an aesthetic artifact. If in the collective imagination the South played and plays a powerful role, any image that could be related to the South, if only because of an artist's biography, could also become the screen on which to project the phantasmatic South of the collective imagination. In the case of Eggleston's work, efforts to downplay region as the grid through which his photographs might be situated and interpreted have faced frustration. John Szarkowski's introduction to William Eggleston's Guide, emphasizing as it does the formal innovations of the project, has had little impact on the more persistent classification of the photographer's work as unabashedly Southern. Eggleston's wry comment in response to Alfred Barr's interest in his recurring formal strategies - that all of his photographs are "based compositionally on the Confederate flag"(2) - suggests that at least one photographer knew in advance the degree to which a Southern mythology would haunt even those photographs whose creators insist on the insignificance of region as it relates to their work - an effort with which Eggleston, without much success, has involved himself.

If exceptions will badger an argument that suggests that regionalism tends to be narrowly associated with the South, the conspicuous presence of the South in relation to regionalist photography suggests that a recourse to exceptions will only leave a number of questions unanswered. With Eggleston in mind, what, one might ask, is the effect a Southern content has on even the most rigorously formalist photography? Or, thinking of the iconic status reached by certain Farm Security Administration (FSA) images, why does Southern photography grip the popular imagination as it does? And, in relation to traditions of fine art photography, what historical factors have contributed to the preeminence given Southern images among other regionalist works? Accepting the seductive power and enormous reach of a Southern mythology, it is not surprising that when regionalism is the issue, it is the South that takes center stage. But what, within the sphere of serious photography, prompts nothing so much as a perpetuation of both the mythologies associated with the South and, in tandem, the South's significant visibility as a region apart? The collections mentioned above, making the South again an object of fascination and artistic import, suggest that such questions are still important today.

Picturing the South contains a range of photographs: anonymous nineteenth century carte-de-visites, a Gardner image of ruined Richmond flour mills, work attributed to Mathew Brady's studio, a number of FSA commissions, selections from Robert Frank's The Americans, a still from Gone with the Wind, W. Eugene Smith's photograph of a Ku Klux Klan meeting, work by Sally Mann, Lee Friedlander, Eggleston and Birney Imes, to name only a few. In the collection, it is difficult to ignore what feels like a conscious struggle against the system of values that constructs the South as deviant, a deviancy common to what I've called (perhaps rather crudely) the South of the popular imagination. In Dugan's volume, the South's racial and class inequities and violences of all sorts are recognized, but an effort is made to reorganize them with an emphasis on the curious, lasting innocence and authenticity of Southern community as it exerts pressure on that facade of violence.

As Dugan suggests, "despite the perceptible and unbridgeable changes in the material and social conditions of Southern existence, there still persist, for better and ill, the vestiges of a coherent and distinctive regional character and identity."(3) She further associates that character with "a distinctive commitment to family, tradition, and community."(4) The very repetition of the word "distinctive" in relation to the South betrays a belief that a regional essence exists that might be isolated, a belief that the South seems to draw out of people with surprising consistency. One of the collection's writers, Willie Morris, describes a series of photographs by, among others, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Evans and Ben Shahn, all associated with the FSA at one time or another, thus: "Whether taken in the thirties, forties, or fifties these photographs share an ineluctable thread: people gathered in clusters in towns and stores, by creeks and levees, the very facades of buildings with their signs and posters inviting the native human species: community."(5)

In The Mind of the South (1941), W. J. Cash both remarks that the South is commonly perceived as a place of "a remarkable homogeneity" and, at the same time, perpetuates this view of such homogeneity in describing the South as profoundly absorbed in the pleasures of "orgiastic religion and those of violence."(6) He goes so far as to present a South of extremes, a South having something like an enemy-within identity: "[Reconstruction] established what I have called the savage ideal as it had not been established in any Western people since the decay of medieval feudalism, and almost as truly as it is established today in fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia - and so paralyzed Southern culture at the root."(7) Strong words, but one need only look at such recent films as Ghosts of Mississippi (1996, by Rob Reiner) or A Time to Kill (1996, by Joel Schumacher), both mobilizing what Jack Temple Kirby refers to as "neo-abolitionist" rhetorics,(8) to see that such a vision of the backward South, centered around the "savage ideal," continues to have great popular currency. While Dugan offers a view that generously sets itself in opposition to such negative understandings of a regional essence, the manner in which she ferrets out a "distinctive" regional character is no less confident and, ultimately, homogenizing. With different ends in mind, these examples demonstrate a pervasive tendency to essentialize the character of the South.

Of course, the intimate relation between serious photography and the American South cannot be explained solely in the light of a widespread, popular fascination with the region, whose common conception has a particularly distinctive character, whether rooted in irrational behaviors or an almost prelapsarian sense of community. Published only seven years after Cash's text, John Kouwenhoven's Made in America leads one to see that the search for an American vernacular, a distinctive American art form born of "democratic and technological necessities" and a "respect for actuality,"(9) would find its apotheosis in Evans. Just as Kouwenhoven discovers in certain of the FSA's building projects a vernacular tradition freed from a longstanding, parasitic dependence on the motifs common to nineteenth-century architectural historicism, a similar end to a dependence on European trends has been claimed with some regularity in the FSA photographs - a dependence haunting photography even after Alfred Stieglitz shed his pictorialist identity to promote "straight photography."

Alan Trachtenberg's claim that Evans's photographs are as capable of evoking "a native tradition while elucidating a modern conception of the art of photography" exemplifies the terms within which Evans has been elevated.(10) With Emerson as his Virgil, Kouwenhoven advocates an American tradition which, hearing the call of necessity rather than searching for beauty in the rubble of the past, rediscovers beauty in its return "back to the useful arts." And while Kouwenhoven's interest in the "further simplification and further stripping away of nonessentials" placed a figure like Evans squarely at the center of an American vernacular,(11) Evans further secured an almost sanctified status when Szarkowski later promoted him as a guiding spirit, perhaps even the guiding spirit, of American photography. In either case, the space cleared for Evans, together with the fact that his most celebrated images remain those of his Southern travels, has led to a complex association between serious American photography and the South as a subject matter. As both object of popular fascination and in its relation to the burgeoning American vernacular of Kouwenhoven's vision (a vision shared by many) the South has earned a special position in relation to photographic regionalism.

Surely it is no surprise then that in Dugan's collection the bulk of the images are loosely related to the documentary style associated with the Evans legacy, to that straightforward style through which, in Trachtenberg's words, photographs "look like incontrovertible records of fact."(12) The role Dugan claims for photography in relation to the examination of a Southern regional character, which, again, she describes as a profound sense of community, is significant as it relates back to the documentary impulse: "These lovingly preserved photographs have an undeniable immediacy and evocative power, and they reveal, perhaps most poignantly, the pervasive and compelling need to construct our own histories from the raw material of the objective."(13) The "respect for actuality" that Kouwenhoven identifies as the distinguishing characteristic of the American vernacular tradition and the "distaste for the tendentious" that Szarkowski locates in Evans's work,(14) both are echoed in Dugan's appeal to the "raw material of the objective." Simplicity, immediacy, the "raw": the Evans of an American vernacular is again the presiding spirit.

Granted, Dugan suggests that through photography we can construct narratives that allow complexity, that, in Walter Benjamin's words, "brush history against the grain."(15) Despite her effort to present a counter-history, what we see is altogether recognizable. Racial strife, religious fanaticism, an obsession with its own history - in Kirby's words, a "brutal and backward" South is screened for us again supporting our common perceptions. As is often the case, when a popular conception such as that of a deviant South is inverted, the framework of the earlier conception remains intact. Dugan's strategy - the inversion of the negative values commonly assigned to the South - necessarily reproduces the very terms that it seeks to overcome and reminds one of the pitfalls associated with certain strands of European modernism. If in the latter case the "primitive" went from being the negative index of European supremacy to being the fantastic figure associated with a lost, authentic past, in Dugan's vision of the South we see not the upheaval of an atavistic region as it is pulled reluctantly into modernity, but an authenticity otherwise lost to us. In either case, the picture remains the same - only the values given it change. Atavism and authenticity are merely two views of the same object, a South that remains stuck in the past.

Comprised of various works of short fiction interspersed with the work of contemporary photographers, A New Life marries the photographic and the literary in much the same way as Picturing the South. However, if Dugan nods to the objectivity of the photograph and, implicitly, to the Evansonian "vernacular" tradition, Harris's anthology emphasizes not the objectivity, but the subjective nature of photographic practice. This emphasis, however, quickly veils the manner in which a mythology of the South influences even the most "subjective" efforts. In short, when subjectivity becomes synonymous with individuality, as it seems to in this book, the manner in which the South of the popular imagination impacts on the photographer's practice is only differently obscured. Although the book consists of both literature and photography, the latter is severed from external determinants, finally becoming a mystified self-expression, one that draws attention away from Southern life as object of collective obsession.

Reflecting upon a series of his own images included in the introduction, Harris writes, "At the time [of their production], I was exploring the South with my view camera and color film, but never quite knew what I was looking for or - by the end of the project - what I had found."(16) But what we see, not surprisingly, is consistent with the already known of the South. My point is not that he is deliberately evasive, rather, in seeing the South as someone already indoctrinated into its mythologies, Harris knew exactly what he was looking for and found it. His first image depicts a small, hardly prosperous looking strip mall with industrial development in the background, and, most prominently, a dilapidated sign bearing a large neon flower and the words "Magnolia Shopping Center." The somewhat indelicate balance between the magnolia as sign of the South's heritage and the ruin-in-progress of the mall show us not what we don't know about the South but what we've already been told: The South, obsessed with its own history and the signifiers of its past glory, is paralyzed in the face of ongoing modernization. The second Harris photograph, taken in Charleston, South Carolina, shows four Corinthian columns, the last fragments of an antebellum mansion that connote both the grandeur of a Southern past and the present as ruin. The third and fourth photographs, both of one-story brick homes with lawn ornaments, speak of the "New South"; its reduced aesthetic and heightened ironies reminding one of Eggleston's photographs. My point again is not simply that Harris is treading on old turf, rather that his appeal to subjectivity, to what is finally the interiority of the artist, diverts attention away from the impact a Southern mythology has on the photographer's practice as an externaI influence. One is not necessarily powerless against such a mythology, but one can't help but get tangled in it, as Harris has become.

Included in A New Life are Nic Nicosia's portrait commissions which, when presented as images of the South, become discursively entangled with myths of a Southern aristocracy that is notoriously inseparable from class and race inequities. Warmed by a soft focus, these black and white photographs of the well-to-do in their domestic environments are hardly "Southern" at first glance. Indeed, were these images not set in a regionalist frame, their affect would be dramatically different, and probably far less interesting. But the relationship between the frame - "these are all photographs of the South" - and the images themselves is left unexplored. Long construed as a region obsessed with the past, the South-as-photograph easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Appeals to either the objectivity of the photograph or the subjectivity of the photographer draw our attention away from questions about the ideological role that the South plays, for both artists and viewers.

This reluctance to explore the South-as-image can also be found in Picturing the South. In Bobbie Ann Mason's essay, accompanied by a number of photographs illustrating a South wrestling with the burgeoning civil rights movement and a rusting white aristocracy, like Alain Desvergnes's photograph of a "privileged little girl" posing in front of a Southern mansion while a Confederate flag waves in the background. Mason describes her youthful experiences of "black music" in terms that suggest an artistic strategy rooted in an identification with the margins of Southern culture: "The music was alien and yet somehow closer to my experience than were the tea parties of more privileged little girls. I sensed that in encouraging me to love this music as he did, my father was teaching me something important."(17) What I would call the "privileged marginality" of the artist is validated, is authenticated through an association with the margins of Southern culture. But this play of establishing a center, the "privileged little girls," and a margin, "black music," does nothing so much as allow us to situate Mason's voice as an artistic voice, as that oxymoronic privileged marginality long celebrated by intellectuals. The authenticity of a "real" Southern culture becomes the artist's authenticity, an act of exchange that takes place behind the screen of a loosely documentary impulse.

Such a move is hardly new - it is the foundation stone of primitivism. Approaching it more self-reflexively, more self-critically, of course, would threaten such an exchange, would involve discussing how the artist profits from such an exchange and, thereby, diminish the returns. Michele Wallace's reading of Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" suggests that Mailer offers a particularly bombastic example of the "liberal" rhetorics that Mason employs:

It may be one of the signs of a truly decadent society when major so-called radical voices begin to romanticize oppression. Mailer had, in 'The White Negro,' become such a voice. Since the new, sanitized, civilized man was killing us off, Mailer exhorted us to return to that brave and noble primitive creature of the jungle. Never mind that such a man had never really existed, except in the warped imagination of Western males, and certainly did not exist in Harlem.(18)

The authenticity conferred upon the artist through this identification with the margins is best maintained if the very constructedness of the marginal figure, the fantasy of otherness, is denied or, at least, veiled. An appeal to the objectivity of the photograph - "it's not my fantasy you see, it's out there!" - provides just such an effect. If stylistically or rhetorically alluding to Evans brings photography into the privileged sphere of an American vernacular, at the same time it allows the "outsider" artist to obscure the fantasy of otherness that is involved in this conferral of authenticity. The objective style obfuscates the artistic strategy that involves such othering. It is finally a complex web of interactions that explains the continued reverence for both documentary distance, documentary style, and the preeminence given the South as a subject matter, as that regionalism par excellence.

It is worth stressing again how regions take on values as signs, not simply in the context of photographic practices, but within a wider social sphere, particularly in relation to questions of "nation." As Richard Gray has argued in a recent anthology on Southern culture, "mental maps" are a grid organizing the popular imagination's understanding of "nation," functioning as a "consistent pattern of regional evaluation that has at its center a remarkable, and for the most part sharply negative, image of the South."(19) Thus, in the context of "nation," the South has that outsider status that can confer on the Southern artist a kind of authenticity through association, but only so long as the radical difference assigned the South, based on an essential regional character, is justified and sustained.

Understanding region in this manner helps to explain why New England photography, for instance, is not commonly thought of as "regional." Nancy Newhall and Paul Strand's Time in New England (1950) - the exemplary text of New England photography - gathers less energy from the "mental map" of the popular imagination when contrasted with the Southern photo-texts of the Evans/Agee and Bourke-White/Caldwell photo-texts, and this primarily because New England does not have that strong negative charge given the South in those mental maps.(20) What Hortense Spillers has said of the African-American woman might finally be said of the South: "My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented."(21) This is not to say, of course, that the South and its history are simply an invention, rather, that how the South and its history are visually "remembered" is partially dependent on how they function, particularly as visual constructs within the mental maps of "nation." That New England does not hold that central negative position makes it less "useful" in the play through which the artist has conferred upon him or her an outsider identity, an authenticity born of that association with region that finally serves to perpetuate a popular fantasy of the South.

A passage in W. J. T. Mitchell's Picture Theory (1994) might highlight one of the more conspicuous roadblocks in the critical investigation of Southern images. Mitchell makes a rather dramatic distinction between Evans's and Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Bourke-White and Caldwell's Have You Seen Their Faces, suggesting that in the former case the isolation of the photographs from the text is an "ethical strategy."(22) In Evans and Agee's book, 62 of Evans's photographs, without captions or even titles, precede even the publication information, stand apart from all text. Mitchell implies that in the latter book, where captions are placed below the images (often as if spoken by the photographs' subjects and serving a powerful anchoring function that is finally both sentimental and pedantic in its effects) meaning is forcefully directed by the captions, which exert a kind of interpretive violence against the photographs. This idea, of course, returns us to the dream of a photography which, true to the promise of a documentary style, speaks for itself. That it is somehow more "ethical" to remove the text from the image suggests that, when left alone, the image is that "raw material" to which we are not bound in regard to interpretation. As I have already suggested, given the pervasive feeling that the South can be thought of as having a distinctive regional character, always already interpreted for us. The isolation of the image in no way diminishes this impact. The effect of the text on the photographs is slight in comparison to the haunting presence of Southern fantasies.

Mitchell's position helps buttress the dream of documentary objectivity. This dream, together with the promotion of an American vernacular that "speaks a plain language," has elevated Evans, Eggleston and Christenberry as the central figures in photographic regionalism, and demoted photographers like Clarence John Laughlin. Haunter of Ruins (1997), a collection dedicated to the work of Laughlin, makes much of the fact that Laughlin, rather than isolating his images in the way Mitchell advocates, bombards his photographs with words. As one of the collection's contributors suggests, Laughlin's "written commentaries on specific images have often been characterized as restrictive, heavy-handed, or unnecessary."(23) Influenced by the Surrealists, Laughlin attempts to effect an uncanniness that sometimes forced, but as a photographer of the South, his manipulations make explicit the fantasy dimension that is otherwise concealed in work drawing on the documentary style. In a sense, he allows the constructedness of the South, the presence of a fabric of myth, to emerge more plainly than in photography assimilable to the Evans legacy. The South often emerges more as a drama enacted than an objective fact; which is not to say that these images are more real or more true, but that, in a sense, they draw attention to their own entanglement with myth as an inescapable frame.

Laughlin's interest in what he calls the "unreality of the real"(24) is often played out as an obsession with a history inescapably imbricated with myth. Put simply, Laughlin's images suggest that seeing the South as a reality is forever frustrated by the fact that the South is difficult to see without its imagined past dictating how it is seen; its reality is powerfully mediated by its myth. If Southernness is commonly described as a kind of inability to let go of the past, if memory (as historian C. Vann Woodward has suggested), is an obsession which, at least in part, gives the South its regional distinctiveness, Laughlin's work forces one to question whether this is simply a Southern characteristic or a way of seeing the South. In Picturing the South, writer Josephine Humphreys admits that the South is "hard to see because it's so full of images itself," but she quickly turns this image generating capacity upon a Southern character rather than on a more collective fascination with the South: "Southerners love Southern stories and pictures, an obsession that feeds art but keeps you guessing about the truth."(25) In contrast, Laughlin draws attention to what I would. call "Southern seeing," which is not to say a way that Southerners see, but a way of seeing the South, regardless of the position of the seeing subject.

To say that the South is obsessed with the past might finally be a kind of displacement, obscuring the fact that as a nation we are obsessed with the South as past. Theorist Homi Bhabha suggests that negotiating the past as a "'past-present' becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living."(26) When the South is made visible, whether in contemporary images or in those already accepted as important to a photographic history, the obsession with the past that Bhabha locates as a necessity of contemporary life is commonly projected onto the image and onto the Southern community, which is to say, away from the seeing subject and her agency in negotiating the "past-present." Much of the struggle involved in seeing how the South functions in relation to imagining the past is obscured in this very act.

The South, as a subject matter, must be self-reflexively struggled with if it is to be represented as more than the sum of its mythic pasts, pasts that lose their historical specificity as constructions when the heirs to a documentary photography continue to promise something related to objectivity. Whether Dugan's or Harris's collections are perpetrators or victims of Southern seeing - of a mythology that in some respects overpowers their individual efforts - is not simply moot, but also a diversionary issue. More to the point, their respective projects spur on questions regarding the complicated entanglement of photographic regionalism with the deeper, more obscured network of nationalism's sentimental rhetorics, questions that they neither directly pose nor - and this follows of course - attempt to answer.

Refusing dominant myths of the South - even if this means constructing something like alternative myths - might mean returning, as readers, to photographs such as those of Laughlin, and reinterpreting them as images about Southern seeing. Refusing to pretend that the archive speaks in its own voice seems a part of the project, as does the investigation of memory as an active process. Nationalism requires the service of memory ("official memories"), and photography does important work at the juncture between "nation" and memory that has both profound effects and affects. Until the South is critically understood as a region that functions as difference, it will rise again - a South, that is, that arrives in the comfortable costume of memory, parades as history, while always earning its wages at the office of myth. Bhabha's admonition that the "critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present,"(27) needs to be extended beyond the critic to the photographer, the photographic historian and the writer. This is demanded, however quietly, by questions surrounding regionalism.

NOTES

1. See Deborah Bright's essay, "Of Marlboro Men . . . ." in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989).

2. John Szarkowski, "Introduction," William Eggleston's Guide, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), p. 13.

3. Ellen Dugan, ed., Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), p. 13.

4. Ibid, p. 14.

5. Willie Morris, "Blessed that We Were," in Dugan, p. 92.

6. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, (New York: Vintage, 1941), p. 136.

7. Ibid, p. 137.

8. Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

9. John A. Kouwenhoven, Made in America, (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 210.

10. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. 234.

11. Kouwenhoven, p. 35.

12. Trachtenberg, p. 246.

13. Dugan, p.15.

14. John Szarkowski, ed., Walker Evans, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), p. 20.

15. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 257.

16. Alex Harris, "Introduction," in Alex Harris, ed., A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South, (New York: DoubleTake, 1997), pp. xii-xiv.

17. Bobbie Ann Mason, "Across the Divide," in Dugan, p. 142.

18. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, (New York: Verso, 1990), p. 44.

19. Richard Gray, "Negotiating Differences: Southern Culture(s) Now," in Richard H. King and Helen Taylor, eds., Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, (New York: NYU Press, 1996), p. 225.

20. Nancy Newhall, ed., Time in New England, (Millerton: Aperture, 1950).

21. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics, Vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987), p. 65.

22. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 295.

23. John H. Lawrence and Patricia Brady, eds., The Haunter of Ruins: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin, (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1997), p. 9.

24. Clarence John Laughlin, from "A Statement by the Photographer," Aperture, Vol. 17, nos. 3 and 4 (1973), p. 117.

25. Josephine Humphreys, "I Will Tell You a Place," in Dugan, p. 175.

26. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7.

27. Ibid, p. 12.

WARREN ZANES is a doctoral candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester.