Consisting of images of rushing streams, secluded lakes, and the structures that disrupt or contain these waterways, the Savannah River Basin Photographic Survey depicts water as both a vital resource and a recreational point of connection.
A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue
My family has laid claim to a variety of nationalities and regional affiliations, yet there are still questions I reflect on from time to time regarding my own claim to my current home. Am I a Southerner, and do I have a right to call myself a Southerner? Will others recognize me as a Southerner, despite my lack of accent and because of my Asian face? And what does it mean to take on this identity—what does it mean for me to claim Dixie?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
CDS Shortwave is a new project from the Center for Documentary Studies’ DocX lab—a place for technology-influenced, imaginative thinking around documentary forms, styles, and perspectives.
On the architecture of white supremacy
Let us look again, now, at this beautiful house, read it this time as a series of universally legible signs for white supremacy. You arrive on horseback and wait outside a gate—the first of several barriers, both physical and human, that must be passed through to reach the master—and enter onto a private road that takes you through a cathedral-like apse of oaks, arranged to express the planter’s dominion over the natural world. From this road, you do not see the functional buildings—kitchen, smithy, stables—nor the quarters for the people the planter enslaves; those are small, unpainted, off to the side. The planter’s house stands alone at the end of this archway of boughs, a telos and a temple. Great white columns rise two stories from their plinths, supporting a pediment that drags its tip against the sky. It looks for all the world like a Roman temple. And who lives in temples but the gods?
A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones
“To me, she is beauty, she is grace, she is Miss America; America would never name her that, because she had hard features and was Black and proud, but she is what America is actually made of.”
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
In college I had long hair past my shoulders. I always got weird when it came time for the seniors to shave the freshmen’s heads. We did it on the last weekend of summer camp, right before the first day of class. Some of the fifth-year guys got creative: Mohawks and bald spots. Every once in a while, they’d leave some poor kid’s bangs.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Strembicki photographed forty-four houses of worship in the Lower Ninth ward of New Orleans, then revisited them year after year, speaking with pastors, deacons, and members, recording the state of their church and its structures.
A video supplement to “Oaxaca Wreck” by John T. Edge, published in the Spring 2019 issue.
“When I moved to Mississippi in 1995, I became a quick regular at Bottletree Bakery, just off the square, across from the church that my family would subsequently join. At that low counter, with a thick china mug in hand, I ate scones pocked with crystallized nuggets of ginger and pored over grad school texts. I befriended the charming misfits and dreamers who poured refills and stared at their shoes and beamed guileless smiles. And then I quit the place. Because I got jaded. Because I got busy.”
—John T. Edge, “Oaxaca Wreck”
A feature essay from the Spring 2019 issue.
Kris’s threat to leave was a loaded one. No West Virginian makes that decision lightly, and to be the cause of someone’s leaving is a terrible thing. I personally knew the weight of missing home. During all my years away, even as I enjoyed the freedom of living in a community where I felt completely comfortable talking about my sexuality, I kept my eye on returning to West Virginia. I had never found a place that felt as good to me, both in terms of the natural beauty and also the sense of a close-knit community—that feeling of being a part of something unique and true. Ever since I left I’d had a hope that someday I could return and my queer self and my Appalachian self wouldn’t have to be so split.
A Conversation with Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg
I understand that if you’re a record store, you have to sort things and folk is an easy category for us to fall into. But if you’re a music nerd and a music writer then you would not say folk; folk wouldn’t mean a confessional songwriter, which is what I am. Folk music should be communal, something like, “You guys know this one? Here, sing along.”
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
If you’ve never been a young person on a big campaign, it’s hard to convey how thrilling the atmosphere is—part cult, part war, with stolen intervals of shore-leave. It went on for six months, through a January run-off, and it was a euphoric experience.
Based in Oxford, Mississippi, White has spent the past twenty years exploring reservoirs, and her project, Southern Oceans, relies on “photography’s potential to de-familiarize the harnessed water of enormous public-works projects, transforming them into newly imagined landscapes.”
