Kathleen Robbins, The Skinning House, 2007, Digital C-print.
Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Photography quickly replaced painting as the most authentic means of recording the human form. In the 1860s, tintypes were the cheapest and most common form of photography. The 1863 portrait of Private Samuel McNulty of the 3rd Battalion, Mississippi Infantry is an example of early tintype portraiture.
Promised Gift of the artist.
The tradition of photo portraiture is continued in this exhibition with the work of Eudora Welty, Jane Rule Burdine, Bruce West, and Maude Schuyler Clay. These photographers work outside the studio on location, producing portraits within the documentary tradition using natural light.
Marion Post Wolcott, Movie Theatre, Belzoni, MS, 1939, Silver gelatin print.
Ogden Museum, gift of the Roger H. Ogden Collection.
Ogden Museum. Gift of the Roger H. Ogden Collection.
Eudora Welty is known primarily as a writer, but she was also an accomplished photographer. Welty applied to the Information Division of the FSA with the hopes of becoming a staff photographer. Although never hired by the FSA, she worked for the Census Bureau in the 1930s and 1940s, travelling and photographing her native state of Mississippi, producing a wonderful body of work including Child on Porch and Woman of the Thirties.
The ability of the photograph to incite social change continued during the civil rights movement of the 1950 – ‘60s. This is exemplified in the photographs of Matt Herron, George Ballis, Franke Keating, and Danny Lyon. The Southern Documentary Project, founded by Matt Herron, was a group of photographers that recorded the rapid social change taking place in Mississippi and other parts of the South as civil rights organizations brought northern college students to work in voter registration and education. Dorothea Lange served as informal advisor to the project. Many of their photographs were published in newspapers, and magazines such as Life, Newsweek, and Time – bringing images of the struggle for equality in Mississippi to the masses.
The photographs of Jessica Ingram and Milly Morehead West are contemporary takes on the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s – 60s. Ingram’s Prayer Helps, near Meadsville, MS, is part of her Civil Rights Memorial photo series. Ingram re-photographs sites where eventful and sometimes tragic events relating to the civil rights movements took place. Milly Morehead West’s color photograph Schwerner, Chaney, & Goodman shows mug shots of the slain civil rights workers out of context and displayed in a modern convenience store amongst items for sale.
David Rae Morris, Tom Rankin, Stuart Klipper, Jack Spencer, Mark Steinmetz, Jack Kotz and Kathleen Robbins work within the documentary photographic tradition, but infuse their photographs with a more formal artistic aesthetic. These photographers use their skills as visual artists to produce work that is within a documentary tradition, yet is executed with the craftsmanship and skill of a fine artist. They produce work that reflects both their sensitivity to formal design and their affinity to the land and culture of Mississippi.
Music, folklore, and the cultural traditions of Mississippi inform the photographs of William Ferris, Roland Freeman, Birney Imes and Terry Wood. These photographers use their camera as an anthropological tool, thus attempting to preserve, through their work, the dying traditions of a culture whose way of life is quickly vanishing.
A friend of Man Ray and a fellow surrealist, Clarence John Laughlin produced dreamy photographs that pay homage to a mythical past within the context of modernity. Man Ray described Laughlin’s photographic technique as the "symbolic use of the camera." The Enigma, a photograph of the ruins of Windsor Plantation in Port Gibson, Mississippi, is both allegorical and beautiful, combining classical architecture framed within a ghost-like blur of flora – moving like spirits in the wind.
William Eggleston - one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century - pioneered color photography in the 1970s and invented the snapshot esthetic, in many ways influenced by his love of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eggleston’s mastery of color in this exhibition is evident in Moose lodge, Greenville MS. In this photograph Eggleston captures the saturated warm light of the magic hour just before sunset.
Mississippi Photographs 1860s to Present, ends where it began with the use 19th century photographic processes in the work of Euphus Ruth and S. Gayle Stevens. The tintypes of Ruth and Stevens are on the forefront of the revival of early photographic processes that has exploded in popularity in recent years to counter the domination of digital photography. Ruth’s photograph, House, Hwy 8 West, looks out of time in 2011, like a relic of the past, and yet it is so modern. S. Gayle Stevens’ tintype series, Pass, documents the aftermath of the destruction of Pass Christian. Placed in a grid, these photographs of ruins, artifacts and the ocean present a lush and fresh take on the destruction of the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Richard McCabe, August 2011