Protesting the Privilege of Perception

This chapter explores how Hale County, Alabama became an iconic site of documentary representation during the twentieth century and why some its poor black and white residents resisted the attempts of documentarians to turn their private lives into public symbols. The chapter begins by examining the collaboration between two local white documentarians, amateur folklorist and poet, Martha Young and photographer J.W. Otts, who recorded the lives and customs of Hale County’s rural black people in the early 1900s. It focuses on Young’s dialect poems that speak from the perspective of black women who refused to be photographed by whites and who saw photography as an exploitative medium. Next, the chapter demonstrates how this narrative and tradition of resistance to documentary continued during the 1930s. It explores the resistance writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans faced in the 1930s from some of the white tenant families they documented for their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it shows how their descendants often found new ways to resist documentarians and journalists in succeeding decades. These acts of resistance transformed poor black and white residents into actors rather than just icons in the documentary process.

Documenting SNCC and the Rural South

This chapter examines the cultural politics of civil rights movement photography by analysing the work of Danny Lyon who worked as a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1962 and 1964. It explores how documentarians such as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and James Agee inspired Lyon’s documentary work and how the political culture of the New Left influenced his work’s reception. The chapter first focuses on Lyon’s photographs of black SNCC activists in the South, particularly Robert Moses. Lyon’s photographs of Moses helped spread a romantic mythology around Moses and SNCC that was useful in recruiting white liberal support up North. Lyon also photographed the rural South’s landscapes and people extensively. Many in the New Left romanticized rural black southerners as true outsiders, the authentic opposites of their industrialized and commercialized societies back home. Consequently, Lyon’s photographs had the capacity to aestheticize the same conditions that SNCC recognized as the source of black subjugation. The chapter also highlights how these images and themes appeared and circulated in a civil rights movement photography book, The Movement, which Lyon contributed to and helped produce.

Introduction

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

What a Place This South Is

This chapter examines Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano’s images of Greene County, Georgia during the New Deal. It highlights his collaboration with sociologist Arthur Raper who was conducting his own fieldwork in Greene County for the FSA. With Raper’s assistance, Delano created an extraordinary photographic record, making Greene the most photographed county in the most documented region during the New Deal. Nevertheless, Delano emphasized certain images of Greene County that link his work to the region’s broader documentary tradition. His photographs both exposed the poverty and environmental exploitation that were products of the region’s cotton economy and romanticized the county’s seemingly premodern folk and agrarian roots, which neutralized his work’s reformist agenda. This chapter also uncovers the resistance Raper and Delano faced to their documentary work in Greene County. Some whites feared Raper’s work with New Deal agencies might undermine white supremacy while the county’s rural black people occasionally expressed resentment at the intrusion of a government photographer, even one motivated by New Deal liberalism. These suspicions and acts of resistance led Raper and Delano to create a sanitized images of Greene County in Tenants of the Almighty, a documentary book that represented the culmination of their collaboration.

Field Trip—Kentucky

This chapter explores the field recordings, films, and photographs John Cohen made in eastern Kentucky during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly of the musician Roscoe Holcomb. It discusses Cohen’s connection to the era’s folk music revival and how his documentary work in the region represented both a break with his predecessors and a continuation of the tradition’s dominant themes. Cohen was motivated by personal desire and aesthetic interests rather than reformism or politics. Under the influence of the modern folk revival, Beat culture, Abstract Expressionism, and existentialism, Cohen created a new documentary ethos and methodology. Yet, he also presented Holcomb and southern Appalachia in a familiar manner. In his photographs, on records such as Mountain Music of Kentucky, and in his film, The High Lonesome Sound, they represented pure tradition, symbols of folk authenticity in an increasingly standardized and commercialized America. This chapter also addresses how Holcomb, and some members of his family, challenged Cohen’s vision of their culture and home, and how Holcomb himself, despite his friendship with Cohen, occasionally resisted Cohen’s attempts to represent his private life for a public audience.

Conclusion

The Epilogue explores the legacy and continued relevance of documentary work of the South. It highlights how the region’s documentary tradition influenced the work of travel writer Paul Theroux and his 2015 book, Deep South, which also includes photographs by Steve McCurry. Theroux and McCurry returned to many iconic sites in the region’s tradition, including Hale County, Alabama, and their work often resorted to clichés borrowed from their documentary predecessors. Travel writing functioned as one of the South’s first documentary forms of witness and its persistence in the twenty-first century testifies to the enduring need to seek out and document places that retain vestiges of the past where one can still encounter and record the roots of the region’s social and economic problems as well as its indigenous cultures. In this regard Deep South, like past travel writing and documentary work, imagines the South as the still alluring and yet pathological colonial appendage of the nation in need of reform. The chapter closes by reflecting on why the South will remain of interest to documentarians and why documentary will continue to generate contentious debates over the nature of identity and reality.

Race, Region, and Resistance

This chapter examines the documentary work of UNC sociologist Howard Odum. It demonstrates how Odum harnessed new fieldwork methodologies and technologies such as the graphophone and phonophotography, along with the modern research university, to document black culture in the South. Odum called the products of his documentary fieldwork, community and folk background studies. His early studies from the 1900s grew out of graduate work with the twentieth century’s premier social scientists, G. Stanley Hall and Franklin Giddings. During this time, Odum’s documentary work fit into a broader Progressive reform impulse that sought solve the era’s race problems in the name of enlightened white supremacy. The second half of the chapter examines Odum’s folk song fieldwork and studies from the 1920s, including his books, The Negro and His Songs and Negro Workaday Songs. It also highlights his collaboration with psychologist Milton Metfessel and their use of film and photography to document black folk music. This chapter also emphasizes the resistance Odum faced from some black people during his fieldwork and how black writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston challenged his images of black southerners.