History’s visual echo – Mississippi Today

The way a photographer sees the world is just as important as the decisive moment when a finger clicks the shutter. And what the photographer sees enlarges the viewer’s idea of what is a subject worthy of being captured by the camera and seen as art or documentary evidence. 

Former Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks saw his work behind a camera as his choice of weapons against racism and social injustice. Posthumously discovered street photographer Vivian Meyer discretely captured images of people with an obsessiveness that speaks not only to what she saw but also her deep desire to be part of a world beyond her invisible work as a governess. Faulkner, Poe, Wordsworth, and Pound are all writers who inform the photography of Sally Mann, and she feels her photographs “sing their words back to them,” creating an alchemy of the visual and the verbal.

Like Sally Mann, the photographs of Doy Gorton capture a piece of the Southern past. There is a stark realistic quality to his photographs, more blank confessional verse than romantic sonnets about the South. Yet if you ask him about them, he will say that his photography is about living in the present, not the past. 

“As a photographer, you always live in the present. But then that moment immediately becomes the past,” Gorton said to me one afternoon as I was looking at prints of his photographs on my office floor organized thematically. 

His comment leads me to quote Faulkner from his novel “Light in August”: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” Gorton responded by saying “I’ll never do something as brilliant as Faulkner in trying to describe time and memory. But with me, memory is plastic. It’s real. It’s on a piece of film. It’s not exactly like you’re bringing it out of your mind and you’re writing it on a piece of paper.”

Although many of us think of a photograph as a record of a particular moment in time, a record of what has been, sometimes a photograph captures history’s echo in the present.  The photographs that make up Gorton’s new book “White South” were taken between 1969 and 1970, a time when massive resistance to segregation had begun to crumble. In October 1969, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education case ordered integration in schools in Mississippi. The Holmes decision not only brought about change to the education landscape, but to Mississippi’s social structure as well. It is the change that is looming over white Southerners that Gorton captures with his camera. What is about to change is the meaning of whiteness as a form of social and cultural power.

Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale believes that silence is central to the meaning of whiteness. In her book “Making Whiteness”, Hale notes that the “denial of white as a racial identity, the denial that whiteness has a history, allows the quiet, the blankness, to stand as the norm. This erasure enables many to fuse their absence of racial being with the nation,” thus making whiteness central to what it means to be American. In the world Gorton captures, whiteness is not just central to his subject’s existence as Americans but to their being Southern as well.

The people captured in Gorton’s photographs seem enraptured by the promise of whiteness and the ways they believe it protects them from the harsh realities of the world. It’s an idea you can see in their expressions. The images of men and a family gathered at a George Wallace rally or young children carrying signs promoting “free choice” could very well be present at a Trump rally today. Although the drag races Gorton captures are integrated, the Black men all seem to keep their hands in their pockets, acknowledging the code of behavior that typically governed such interactions. The people gathered all know the racial rules are changing, but they are as of yet unsure of what rules can now be broken or which ones might evolve into something else. As you fix your gaze on Gorton’s images, you may know what happens in the future, but those frozen in the frame are uncertain about what happens next. What you begin to see as you move from image to image is how those same uncertainties Gorton captured more than 50 years ago are very much with us today.

As Gorton moves from streets of small towns into the walls of the state penitentiary at Parchman, he captures segregated groups of prisoners as well as a gun-toting white trusty supervising Black prisoners on horseback. A year after Gorton’s Parchman photographs were made, four prisoners brought the Gates v. Collier case to federal court, charging the prison with brutal conditions that violated the civil rights of prisoners. In 1972 Judge William Keady ordered an end to racial segregation, ended the trusty guard system, upgraded medical care, and made other reforms to the notorious prison that is a known container of cruelty. 

Today the trusty system is gone at Mississippi’s oldest prison, but Parchman remains a place of deadly violence. Violence against guards is as much of a problem as inmate violence. So, while the circumstances Gorton captured with his camera inside Parchman have changed over time, the specter of violence has remained constant. Gorton’s images remind us not only of what once was but also of what remains.

Gorton also went inside the state mental hospital at Whitfield, a place that conjures as many images as Parchman. For a child growing up in Mississippi, there was no worse taunt than “they’re going to send you to Whitfield.” The blank faces in stark institutional backgrounds feel as if they could have been taken today — Mississippi is still one of the worst states for access to mental health care — yet their juxtaposition with images of a Delta debutante ball lets the reader know that they were taken in a particular time and place. What Gorton seems to be communicating through this juxtaposition is that the people dressed in black tie and chiffon in 1969 are indifferent to those suffering in the halls of a mental health ward a hundred miles south of them. As I look at these images today, it reminds me that many of us remain indifferent to the suffering of others.

Dorothea Lange famously said that “the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” In the photographs for “White South” Doy Gorton uses his camera to teach people how to see the ways that whiteness was lived and manifested itself in the lives of all Southerners. It is not as if the world he captured in 1969 and 1970 was hidden behind a veiled mirror. The cars and hairstyles may be different today, made with much less chrome and less hairspray, but much of that world is still with us. It’s just that many of us deny that pieces of the past are still in our midst.

Mississippi is a cultural and emotional touchstone for Doy Gorton, much like Kansas was for Gordon Parks. Gorton grew up in the Delta town of Greenville, the queen city of the Mississippi Delta. When you talk with him about the Delta, you can hear the way that teardrop-shaped piece of land is still very much a part of him, just like Parks never forgot the rolling, windswept prairie that shaped his way of seeing the world. 

“I realized at some point that the Mississippi Delta had become an essential concept all around the world,” Gorton told me.

As he traveled the globe as a photographer for the New York Times, he found that people immediately knew the place where he was from but he didn’t think they really understood it.

“People wrote about the Delta a great deal, but they didn’t understand the things that truly stood out about it, the way the Rocky Mountains stand out in Colorado when you approach them from the plains.” Finding those things that stood out about the Delta and Mississippi is what Gorton decided to capture with his camera.

But it was a complicated journey that led Gorton to take the photographs that grace the pages of his book “White South”. First, he attended the University of Mississippi, where he pledged the Kappa Alpha fraternity, the Old South fraternity that has Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as its spiritual founder. Gorton was at the university when James Meredith was admitted and was so shaken by what happened that he left school and began to wander, first to Florida, then the Bahamas, and eventually to Boston. With newfound friends in Boston he boarded a bus to the 1963 March on Washington. After meeting members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer, Gorton was inspired by the courage of the people of the civil rights movement. He returned to the University of Mississippi, determined to start a progressive student movement.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission infiltrated his student group, which led Gorton to deeper involvement with SNCC during Freedom Summer and eventually into Students for a Democratic Society, where he founded SDS Photo. Photography was a way for the SDS to get the organization’s pro-civil rights and anti-Vietnam War message out to the public. During his time at SDS Photo, Gorton became obsessed with the work of German photographer August Sandler, Swiss photographer Robert Frank and American photographer Walker Evans. It was this obsession with the work of these photographers that influenced the photographs he took in Mississippi between 1969 and 1970.

When Gorton decided to photograph what he describes as the White South, his work was informed by his “unique personal knowledge of the South, civil rights, radical feminism, gay right, and white supremacy” as well as his knowledge of class and caste as a son of the Mississippi Delta. Although this is not a photography book about the Delta, what these pictures capture is the way Gorton sought to understand the way whiteness was lived in the South through the lens of someone raised in the Delta and who understood how whiteness was ingrained into the social structures of the South.

As Gorton told me, “I knew the social codes of behavior and what things looked like. I was also raised to understand power and how to maintain power.” What Gorton did was use the power of his whiteness to capture what he knew he was witnessing: the last days of the last generation to live under state-sponsored segregation.

Although he knew what he was documenting, he wasn’t trying to come up with a coherent message. “I wasn’t trying to build a moral case of any kind. I just tried to photograph history. But a photograph is something of the present, of that moment only. I believed I could shoot the past. I honest to God believed it.” 

Now, all these years later, as these images come into book form, looking back at them Gorton is capturing the missing voice in the text that accompanies his images, some of it in his own words others in the voice of Jane Adams, the cultural anthropologist who serves as his co-author on “White South”. Both of them realize that the photographs capture a specific moment that they are trying to speak to. But they also acknowledge something cultural critic Susan Sontag observed about historical images: “Even those photographs which speak so laceratingly of a specific historical moment also give us vicarious possession of their subjects under the aspect of a kind of eternity: the beautiful.” And the images in “White South” all possess a sort of haunting bleak beauty.

Doy Gorton’s “White South” holds much in common with two books that define modern photography: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by Walker Evans and James Agee and “The Americans” by Robert Frank. A commercial disaster when it was published in 1941, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is now considered one of the great works of nonfiction of the 20^th Century. In Gorton’s image of the battlefield monument at Vicksburg, with the Confederate officer with his horse and upturned sword, he is paying homage to Walker Evans’ photography, since he photographed the same statue in 1936. Gorton captures what Evans called “the progression of the delight of seeing” as well as observations of a place, full and felt. 

Like Evans’ co-author James Agee, Gorton understands that the essential structure of the South is economic. One photograph in particular speaks to that economic structure: the young widow of the Vietnam war who lives in a shotgun shack in Chatam, Mississippi. The shack looks like those Evans captured in Hale County, Alabama, leading James Agee to observe that the American South was a place “run on intuition, and the structures of intuition are as delicate as they can only be in a society which is not merely one thing but two: a dizzying mixture of feudalism and of capitalism in its later stages.”

Like Robert Frank’s “The Americans”, Gorton’s “White South” is book that is personal, poetic and real. What Frank sought to do in “The Americans” was to reveal an America that had gone unacknowledged in the pages of magazines such as Life, in which publisher Henry Luce sought to construct a visual idea of American exceptionalism. In 83 black-and-white photographs, Frank urged his readers to confront the underbelly of racial inequality, corruption and justice as well as question who has access to the American Dream. As Jack Kerouac, the author of the Beat Generation novel “On the Road”, wrote in the introduction to the 1959 edition of “The Americans”, “Robert Frank…he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.” 

In “White South”, Gorton is seeking to do the same thing that Kerouac described, except rather than with the 1950s jazz rhythm Kerouac evokes, he is seeking to create one long continuous blues song with his images, evoking his native Delta and a music that many of the White Southerners he captured on film would not think had anything to do with their lives. Gorton captures a past reality yet he is seeking to evoke some realities of the present while exposing a piece of the past.

“White South” presses its readers to ask themselves many questions, but I think of two in particular that it forced me to ponder: What is it that made whiteness so powerful in the past that the forces of white supremacy are still so present today? And what structures need to become part of the social glue of our society today to make it more equitable? In the photographs in “White South”, you can see the outlines of the answers to these questions. The past can indeed echo what we must do in the present.

“White South” is being published by Fall Line Press. to pre-order a copy go to:  https://falllinepress.com/products/doy-gortons-white-south-1969-70-with-jane-adams