Protesting the Privilege of Perception: Resistance to Documentary Work in Hale County, Alabama, 1900–2010

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [A]ny engagement with visuality in present or past requires establishing its counterhistory.--Nicholas Mirzoeff most intense point of a life, point where life's energy concentrates itself, is where it comes up against power, struggles with it, attempts to use its forces, or evade its traps. --Michel Foucault Since ethnographic other can read, she now presumes to criticise her characterisation and to clamour for right to represent herself. Pity poor ethnographer.--Stephen Tyler (1) PRIDE AND RESENTMENT TWINE Hale County, Alabama. For many, words conjure images of Allie Mae Burroughs's face. (2) Appearing older than her twenty-seven years, she stands before an unpainted clapboard house staring straight into Walker Evans's lens, her lips pursed and brow furrowed. Others may see a kudzu-covered country store embalmed by William Christenberry's lush Kodachrome film. Some might hear in their heads James Agee's often quoted archaeological list of materials he wanted to present to readers instead of words in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech... For others, Hale County summons images of Rural Studio, an innovative architectural project Samuel Mockbee started there in early 1990s. The photographs by Rural Studio's photographer, Timothy Hursley, vividly depict striking designs of houses, chapels, and community centers made of salvaged tires, hay bales, license plates, and innumerable reusable materials. A writer who visited Hale County in 2005 for a story on Rural Studio described its landscape as if it was a gallery displaying work of these documentary artists: Drive through Hale County today, and Agee and Evans' world will come to life. Broken-down pickup trucks and dusty storefronts are evidence of residents' hardscrabble lives, eking out a living on catfish ponds and in cotton fields, in endless battles against kudzu. Look out car window at a freshly plowed acreage, and you'll see Christenberry's Rothko-like bands of brown, green and yellow glistening in afternoon sun. (3) Photography curator and critic Thomas Southall argues that, for these artists, Hale County--or, more accurately, small part of it encompassing some farming families and roadside buildings in a few small towns--has functioned as a place of creative inspiration akin to William Faulkner's fictional cosmos of Yoknapatawpha County. As much as Hale County served as their these documentarians also created this cosmos, granting county, in words of historian Alan Trachtenberg, the status of place in American art and imagination. Hale County has indeed become indelibly linked with work of these three artists and writers, but they were not first--or last--to document area. Here, for more than a century, travel writers, folklorists, journalists, photographers, and filmmakers attempted to reveal realities of life in rural Alabama, and, by extension, South, through documentary forms of expression. Their portrayal of county and its people, however, contributed to a broader twentieth-century romance of rural South that transformed faces, landscapes, and architecture of poor into art that resonated with educated, middle-class audiences eager to see and experience islands of vernacular beauty and authenticity in a sea of standardization. As their work circulated in books, magazines, films, and galleries, Hale County became a place defined by documentarians rather than local residents. (4) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A very different image of Hale County comes into focus, however, if we look at history of documentary work there from perspective of those who have been photographed, filmed, and described. …