Primitive myths: photography and the American South

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Warren Zanes

To say that the South is obsessed with the past might finally be a kind of displacement, obscuring the fact that as a nation we are obsessed with the South as past. Theorist Homi Bhabha suggests that negotiating the past as a "'past-present' becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living."(26) When the South is made visible, whether in contemporary images or in those already accepted as important to a photographic history, the obsession with the past that Bhabha locates as a necessity of contemporary life is commonly projected onto the image and onto the Southern community, which is to say, away from the seeing subject and her agency in negotiating the "past-present." Much of the struggle involved in seeing how the South functions in relation to imagining the past is obscured in this very act.

The South, as a subject matter, must be self-reflexively struggled with if it is to be represented as more than the sum of its mythic pasts, pasts that lose their historical specificity as constructions when the heirs to a documentary photography continue to promise something related to objectivity. Whether Dugan's or Harris's collections are perpetrators or victims of Southern seeing - of a mythology that in some respects overpowers their individual efforts - is not simply moot, but also a diversionary issue. More to the point, their respective projects spur on questions regarding the complicated entanglement of photographic regionalism with the deeper, more obscured network of nationalism's sentimental rhetorics, questions that they neither directly pose nor - and this follows of course - attempt to answer.

Refusing dominant myths of the South - even if this means constructing something like alternative myths - might mean returning, as readers, to photographs such as those of Laughlin, and reinterpreting them as images about Southern seeing. Refusing to pretend that the archive speaks in its own voice seems a part of the project, as does the investigation of memory as an active process. Nationalism requires the service of memory ("official memories"), and photography does important work at the juncture between "nation" and memory that has both profound effects and affects. Until the South is critically understood as a region that functions as difference, it will rise again - a South, that is, that arrives in the comfortable costume of memory, parades as history, while always earning its wages at the office of myth. Bhabha's admonition that the "critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present,"(27) needs to be extended beyond the critic to the photographer, the photographic historian and the writer. This is demanded, however quietly, by questions surrounding regionalism.

NOTES

1. See Deborah Bright's essay, "Of Marlboro Men . . . ." in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989).

2. John Szarkowski, "Introduction," William Eggleston's Guide, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), p. 13.