Primitive myths: photography and the American South

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

This next to the first understanding informs Picturing the South: 1860 to the not absent a 1996 exhibition and work organized by Ellen Dugan. In the collection, single finds a regionalism that sometimes presages and real often profits from the inheritance of for instance, Walker Evans's itinerant photography. It is a regionalism that brings more emphasis on the photographer going to a place, smooth if this means down the block up rather than coming from individual - a regionalism haunted through the ethnographic spirit of '30 documentary work. Simply place as the title suggests, Picturing the southern promotes that regionalism which, as far as satisfied is concerned, gives primacy to place. Another novel book, Alex Harris's anthology A of recent origin Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban southern while quite different in its avowed intentions, participates in this same regionalist course albeit in a somewhat different manner.

In looking from one side the two volumes, it becomes apparent that this next to the first regionalism, that not of geographically situated "schools" on the contrary of an explicit and primary interest in the specificities of place, has advance to be associated with photographs of the southern in particular. While images of the West have ofttimes been absorbed both into discussions of landscape, in which the issue of place is ofttimes 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 southerly often remain more narrowly shackled to the simple fact of referentiality, which is to say, place. Perhaps because they can become the keyhole from one side which the almost mystical light of popular fantasies surrounding the southern might shine, photographs of the southerly are rarely allowed to speak of anything thus much as from where they came, flat when, as in the case of many photographs from A of recent origin 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 upon photographs of the South, they are seen in a reciprocal action, to invest with a body regionalism itself. The potential elasticity of the terminus "regionalism" finally, and paradoxically, be deriveds in something quite unlike an arbitrary collection of photographs from all corners of the map. The southern emerges as a place of particular fascination, flat obsession - the subject par eminence of a regionalist project. in what way this came to be is a question worth exploring.

In thinking end this preeminence given the southern in relation to what I've isolated as a next to the first regionalism, one cannot ignore the impact of like popular books as Alexander Gardner's Gardner's Photographic skeleton Book of the War (1866) Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell's Have You Seen Their Faces (1937) Walker Evans and James Agee's allow 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 southerly this fascination has been managed and cultivated by means of 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 southerly in particular seemed to lead to an impasse at which any picture of the southern would remain as much a regionalist document as an aesthetic artifact. If in the collective imagination the southerly played and plays a powerful part any image that could be related to the southern if only because of an artist's biography, could also become the shield on which to project the phantasmatic southern of the collective imagination. In the case of Eggleston's work, efforts to downplay region as the grid end 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 shoot forward has had little impact upon the more persistent classification of the photographer's work as unabashedly Southern. Eggleston's on one side comment in response to Alfred Barr's interest in his recurring formal strategies - that all of his photographs are "based compositionally upon the Confederate flag"(2) - refer tos that at least one photographer knew in advance the stage to which a Southern mythology would haunt smooth those photographs whose creators insist upon the insignificance of region as it relates to their work - an effort with which Eggleston, without a great deal of success, has involved himself.