Elvis Culture

I understand that Elvis changed the face of American culture in the mid-1950s.  The music he made was a hybrid of earlier kinds of southern music but also something new, not exactly like anything anyone had heard before.  As a performer and recording artist, he carried that music and its constituent southern forms beyond the region and spread them throughout the nation (and, eventually, the world).  As an entertainer, he galvanized a generation, creating an entirely new type of youth culture.  In doing so, he planted seeds of rebellion among his teenage listeners against the largely conformist postwar values of their parents.  I understand all that.

What I don’t understand is the devotion Elvis and his life have inspired among people too young, or too far removed, to have experienced any of that firsthand.  Anyone who was 16 in 1956 is 70 now, yet most of the people who flock to Graceland in mid-August every year to mark the anniversary of Elvis’s death are considerably younger than that.  Many of them, in fact, were not even born in 1977, when Elvis died. Obviously, something larger than just one man’s life—no matter how big that life was—draws them there.  I just don’t quite understand what it is. 

Even though I don’t understand it, I am nonetheless fascinated by it.  I live only 70 miles from Memphis and have gone to Graceland on August 16 several times in the last ten years.  I go there to photograph—not so much to make pictures of people many might think of as unusual, but to try to understand.  For me, photography is a way of finding things out, a way to explore.  I’m less interested in photographing things I already know about (or think I know about) than using a camera to look at things I don’t understand.  And that includes what goes on at Graceland in mid-August every year.

Elvis Devotee, Graceland, 2002

 Waiting for the Candlelight Vigil, Graceland, 2003

Writing a Love Letter, Graceland, 2009

Photographers at Gate, Graceland, 2002

 Scene at Death Week Parade, Memphis, 2004

Selling Souvenirs, Graceland, 2005

"He Touched Me," Graceland, 2005

Memories of Elvis, Graceland, 2005

Projected Image, Graceland, 2003

Picture Taking, Graceland, 2005

By the Side of the Road: Things Seen and Noted

These are pictures of things I've seen on southern roadsides as I drive from one place to another.  Since I'm usually going fairly fast when I first encounter them, they initially seem like visions -- fleeting and  insubstantial.  Only when I turn around and go back do they (some of them at least) become real to me.  Sometimes whatever I saw that made me come back doesn't turn out to be particularly interesting, but I often find something else there to photograph, simply through the very act of turning around, stopping, and getting out of the car.
 

 

Abandoned Cotton Gin, Coahoma County, Mississippi, 2010

 Old Train Depot, Dundee, Mississippi, 2010


 
Football Mural with Satellite Dish, Sledge, Mississippi, 2010

 

Metal-Patched Building, Morven, Georgia, 2009

 

Mammy's Cupboard, Natchez, Mississippi, 2009

 C. H. Harris Store, Cherokee, Alabama, 2009

 

Virtuous Woman Fitness & Tanning, Rapides Parish, Louisiana, 2009

Prefab Shed, Coahoma County, Mississippi, 2009

Windblown Tarps, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, 2009

Bail Bonds, New Albany, Mississippi, 2009

Abandoned Chair, Marshall County, Mississippi, 2008

  Facade, near Blairsville, Georgia, 2008

Rice Treatment Plant, Waverly, Louisiana, 2007

Cotton Gin, Como, Mississippi, 2004

Gentle Store, Limrock, Alabama, 2003

Kudzu-Covered Shed, Lafayette County, Mississippi, 2002

Shed and Prefab Building, Holmes County, Mississippi, 2002

Semi-Circular Metal Building, Coldwater, Mississippi, 2002

Cotton Gin, Money, Mississippi, 2001

Shingled Building, near Abbeville, Mississippi, 2001

Nail Biz, near New Roads, Louisiana, 2000

Mississippi Industrial College, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

I’ve been photographing throughout the South since 1999, when I moved to Mississippi.  I photograph primarily (but not exclusively) on black-and-white film, although I now make hi-resolution scans of the negatives and make digital prints from those scans.  I use both 35mm and 120 film, depending on subject matter.  Generally speaking, if it’s going to hold still for me (landscapes) I use 120; if it isn’t (people) I use 35.  

  

This blog is an attempt to sort through the work I’ve done in the South and place some of the better images in one of several grouped portfolios.  The largest of those, in terms of quantity, will be two groups of images I’ve been spending most of my time on in recent years.  I’ve given one of them a title – “The Power of Belief: The Spiritual Landscape of the American South.”  The other doesn’t have an official name yet, although I think of the pictures as “Townscapes.”  They are photographs of small town environments throughout the American South that are, in one way or another, about the relationship between past and present.  Because there are so many images in these two groups, however, I’m going to wait to post them until I’m more comfortable with this whole blogging process.

 

Some of the other, smaller bodies of work include rural landscapes, images made at a variety of public events, photographs of tourists enjoying various places in the South, and pictures of things I’ve encountered on southern roadsides as I drive from one place to another.  I’m going to start by posting some of the roadside pictures.  I’ll sequence them with the most recent first and will add more as they find their way out of the camera.