In the summer of 2017 I drove from Mississippi to Zebulon, Georgia, where I was one of two artists in residence for Slow Exposures. I wove my way through Alabama on Highway 80, with detours in Demopolis, Uniontown, Selma, and Tuskeegee—never having been to any of these places.
All of these are gonna be from Demopolis, Alabama, this one with Polaroid SX-70 (2020)
My work in Zebulon was to document the town of 1,181 people during my week in residence. Astonishingly, naively, and as a grown person in my forties, I actually thought that was a thing I could do. Why, I’d been through towns all over the South, and created some beautiful Polaroids—of course I could “do” Zebulon in seven whole days.
Polaroid 600 (2017)
What a jerk! If I learned anything that week in Pike County, Georgia, it was that there was incredible, bottomless depths to every single place you could visit. I dedicated a portion of each day to making “portraits” of each building in the Zebulon town square, in addition to roaming far and wide, and I barely finished just the downtown area. Plus, this was only the outsides of the buildings! If anything, I became convinced I could try to make photographs of the place for weeks to come and not “complete” it.
This feeling only deepened a few months later, after Ashleigh Coleman organized a photowalk of Greenwood, Mississippi. “There’s nothing to shoot in Greenwood,” I had said more than once, which is dumb even if it weren’t shallow and reductive. Yet walking the streets slowly with my immediate new friends Ellen, Katie, and Ryan—sparking off what caught their eyes—I realized Greenwood could be as infinite in its way as New York City, as Zebulon had for me that summer.
Polaroid SX-70 (2020)
Which brings us back to Marengo County, Alabama. What had taken me forty years to learn seems to have been part of the artistic practice of other artists for decades. As the Old Man once said, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it . . . .” Like him, William Christenberry found this well of inspiration early on, as he returned throughout his career to certain places in Hale County and elsewhere in Alabama to see what there was to see.
One of those places was in Demopolis, where he time and again checked in on a Coca-Cola sign downtown.
William Christenberry, 5¢, Demopolis, Alabama (1978) chromogenic print (this particular one is in the Smithsonian)
The really fun thing about being in a community of artists is that I can text someone “oh I’m headed off to Demopolis” and they’ll write oh, are you going to see the sign? or telling someone “I went to Demopolis this weekend” and them saying back “oh let me send you this picture of the five cent thing.” Because Christenberry’s love of those splashes of paint on brick have reverberated just as Faulkner’s tales of Jefferson County have.
I don’t know what it was like to walk the streets of Demopolis in the 1970s, although I like to imagine it—lord, I love to imagine it, just as I love to imagine that day Muddy Waters saw Robert Johnson on the street in Friar’s Point. What there is to see now is different, but maybe there are echoes. Maybe if you listen hard enough, maybe if you just press your hands against the brick and listen.
Polaroid SX-70 (2020)
I once thought you could learn all there was to know about a place, thought you could somehow perfectly depict a place on film. Now I am quite certain there is absolutely no way any one person could get close; I am almost overwhelmed with the beautiful vastness of it all—the stories, the places, the people. How gorgeous this world is.
Yes, the places you are visiting have been visited before, art has been made there, lives have been lived, someone built it in the first place, feet even tread the ground before asphalt was poured. Yet there may still be music to play, even if you are singing words written by someone else long ago.
Demopolis Kitty Cat, Polaroid SX-70 (2020)
AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my photography at McCartyPolaroids. If you want to see a PDF of the newspaper we made of art from the Slow Exposures artists-in-residence from ‘15-17, called Population 1,181, you can find it at this dropbox link.