Capturing the South: Imagining America's Most Documented Region (Documentary Arts and Culture, Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University)

This expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologists Howard Odum and Arthur Raper, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. It also explores the contentious history of documentary work in Hale County, Alabama, a place immortalized by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in their collaborative book, __Let Us Now Praise Famous Men__, as well by other documentary artists such as William Christenberry, Martha Young, and J.W. Otts. The work of these documentarians salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. Hale County, Alabama and other places in the region became not only an iconic sites of representation but also battlegrounds where black and white residents challenged the right of documentarians to represent them. The accumulation of influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images of the South created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the region that persists into the twenty-first century. In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. The accumulation of these influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the South that persists into the twenty-first century. The Most Documented Region -- Race, Region, And Resistance: Howard Odum's Community And Folk Background Studies, 1905-1928 -- What A Place This South Is: Jack Delano's Farm Security Administration Photographs Of Greene County, Georgia, During The New Deal -- Field Trip--kentucky: John Cohen, Roscoe Holcomb, And Documentary Expression During The Folk Revival -- Documenting Sncc And The Rural South: Danny Lyon And The Cultural Politics Of Civil Rights Movement Photography -- Protesting The Privilege Of Perception: Resistance To Documentary Work In Hale County, Alabama, 1900-2010 -- Seems A Land Out Of Time: Documentary's Enduring Legacy In The Twenty-first-century South "In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth-century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to [the] region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy"-- Provided by publisher