The American south has been mythologised in literature, film, popular music and photography. From William Faulkner to Muddy Waters, Tennessee Williams to William Eggleston, Gone With the Wind to Huckleberry Finn, it has colonised our collective imagination as a place apart, even a state of mind.
In photography, the American south has been viewed from the inside by native southerners such as Eggleston, William Christenberry and Eudora Welty (who was a very good photographer before she became a great writer) and from the outside, most famously by Walker Evans in the 1930s, and by the likes of Carrie Mae Weems, Alec Soth and Susan Lipper in more recent times. All of the above, with the exception of Welty, are included in Myth, Manners and Memory, a relatively selective, but nevertheless illuminating, group show at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.
Walker Evans's photographs of the American south, taken between 1935 and 1938 during the Depression, for the Farm Security Administration, are among the most celebrated images of the 20th century. You could even say that they made the south synonymous with poverty and struggle in a way that it was once synonymous with segregation and slavery. They changed the way America viewed the south, and the way the south saw itself.
In 1936, while Evans was photographing in and around Hale County, Alabama, William Christenberry was born in nearby Tuscaloosa. In 1960, aged 24, he came upon a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans (and James Agee), which had been republished that year, in a bookshop in Birmingham, Alabama. It changed his way of thinking, helped him see the south anew as a place he could rediscover though photography. Soon after, he began to photograph the places and sites he recognised in the book, many of which were now crumbling remnants of another time.
In 1973, Christenberry persuaded Evans to accompany him on one of his regular road trips to Hale County, which Evans had not visited for 37 years. "Walker kept his distance," Christenberry would later say. "The place is so much part of me, I can't escape it and have no desire to escape it. I continue to come to grips with it… the place is my muse."
One could say the same of the south that William Eggleston, another friend of Christenberry's, depicts. From Memphis, Tennessee, Eggleston also looks with an insider's eye, but his south is a stranger, darker place even in its everydayness. As a southerner, Eudora Welty implicitly understood Eggleston's democratic gaze and its artistic and mythical resonance. "In landscapes, cityscapes, street scenes, roadside scenes," she wrote in her introduction to Eggleston's book The Democratic Forest, "in dreaming long view and arresting close-up, through hours of dark and light, he sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us."
In their separate ways, Carrie May Weems, Susan Lipper and Alec Soth have also subverted the mythology of the south in their photographs. In Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth created an American south that, however much it has changed socially and politically, remains essentially the same. There are echoes here of the old south of plantations and slow-flowing rivers, but also traces of the work of other, older photographers, including Evans, Christenberry and Eggleston.
Weems, the most political photographer here, confronts the turbulent racist history of the American south, placing herself in a series of resonant locations and contrasting the barbarity of slavery with the refined social etiquette that held sway among rich plantation families. Here, photography becomes a kind of still theatre as well as a repository of memory, suffering and struggle.
The most wilfully problematic photographs in Myth, Manners and Memory belong to Susan Lipper. A New Yorker, she spends several months every year in Grapevine Hollow, a remote rural community in the Appalachian mountains. She calls her photographs "collaborations" and curator Celia Davies describes them as "much less documentary, far more cinematic in character".
Lipper's characters are real, but her scenarios are often staged. She plays with stereotypes of the Appalachian south –rednecks, white thrash, the ominous backwoods – while simultaneously portraying a place – and a community – where the often alcohol- or drug-fuelled violence and poverty are very real. It is a long way from Walker Evans but that, perhaps, is the point. The American south is not so much another country as several overlapping, and often contradictory, narratives, all of which continue to tug on our collective imagination even as they elude our understanding.