In the past six months I’ve been running the backroads to see what there is out there. Without a New Orleans or a Memphis at the end of the road in this particular year, more often my return path is angled back to my own place after a day’s shooting. So I’ve been like a little boomerang, casting farther and farther arcs through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. That’s how I ended up at the Love Feast.
Humphreys County, Mississippi, 2020 (Polaroid SX-70) (same for all photos below)
First of all, this sky. This sky is what had me slowing down on Highway 61 in the first place. This was the first weekend in November—the fields had just been emptied, crunched down flat, every road rimmed with tangled skeins of cotton down the side. I’m always pulling over on the side of the road anyways, or making a loop-de-loop to see if that’s what I thought that was, so now I’ve got no excuse with all the time in the world. I started out by hoping, maybe I can get some of that sky into this little frame.
I thought I had done alright with it, then woke up this morning to an email about a new show at Fischer Galleries by the painter Richard Kelso. The first image was called Big Sky, Delta—
Listen, that’s what it really looked like that day in November, if you want to know. The photograph doesn’t get close to what it looked like. Richard Kelso’s rich oils show what it looked like and what it felt like.
So if you turn your head to the right while you’re looking at this sky, you’ll see a little church. It’s like a squished down version of that beautiful church in Sprott, Alabama. When you drive up you realize there’s a graveyard that’s sprawled around and beyond the church, like kudzu—up in the front and all down the side.
It was those two bell-tower like shapes which struck me at first, but the cemetery was beautiful. Then, the columns by the walkway to the church. The light was beautiful but hot and sharp, and at first I couldn’t read the words traced into the concrete, handwritten. Then—ah, the Beatitudes.
The church was called Love Feast, a phrase I had never heard before. The idea of a communal meal to just celebrate life and fellowship sounds like the greatest thing of all time right about now.
Many of the headstones also featured handwriting, of a very particular and steady type—look at the double 5s in the 1955 for Ms. Beasley below—but maybe this could have been wooden forms pressed into the wet concrete? It struck me as beautiful regardless.
There’s some Newton rings at the top in that beautiful blue sky, and just a little blip of a ghost at the bottom, but I’m done worrying about those kind of things. I’m not the world’s best scanner and I can’t control what the film does, and it wasn’t turning out streaky really at all this day.
I loved those two little squat towers so much I realized I kept trying to put them in the background of shots. I wasn’t shooting to necessarily make the world’s best Polaroid, or make work for a museum, I was just trying to experience this place and dissolve into it. There’s such a surprising joy in realizing an hour has passed and you’re still just looking, of gazing in the mirror when you go home and realizing that somehow you got a sunburn.
I didn’t have brunch at Commander’s Palace or see the ducks march at the Peabody this day in November. I just stood in a churchyard. If I hadn’t, while I would have thought the Kelso painting was lovely, I wouldn’t have had the lightning bolt of recognition that hit me before dawn today. I am going to try to see more of what is right around me.
THESE SIX PHOTOGRAPHS were the “best” of Love Feast, but I made one more—if you’d like it, send me an email to davidmccarty @ gmail. I’ll mail it out soon to the first person who drops me a line . . . IT’S RAINING LIKE CRAZY in Jackson today, if anybody has a good movie recommendation let me know. Probably my favorite thing I’ve seen in a while was Gold Diggers of 1933, which had me howling, although I’m partial to going on and on about how mesmerizing Aubrey Plaza was in Happiest Season . . . BAMA TROUNCED AUBURN in the Iron Bowl, so all is right in the world, and hopefully my my new Joe Willie fan club shirt built up some luck . . . LAST WEEK I made it over to Demopolis to visit a certain 5¢ sign . . .
AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my photography at McCartyPolaroids. Happy Thanksgiving.