Thirty years ago I walked into a duplex in Starkville, Mississippi, to hear a band. A friend of mine was on the drumline and he knew some folks in the band. You could hear the music throb from the street, right off Highway 82. It was free to get in. I couldn’t really hear what was going on in the songs, but I could feel it. It was too dark to see anything, and if you wanted to go to the kitchen you had to skoosh past the drumkit, trying not to hit the cymbals as you passed.
Red Bay, Alabama, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)
A while back I thought about a photo project up around that part of the woods to highlight the incredible music that shaped my life. But many of the places were gone; Flo & Eddie’s burned down; multi-story condos cover up where the Doll House was; the YAJ house is a vacant lot; and I think the city code required an immediate teardown of any place the John Black Attack played once it was vacant.
I think about Johnny Thunders warning that you can’t put your arms around a memory. I know he drawls “don’t try,” and he’s right, but I always want to, maybe I have to. I love driving through a place where I’ve never been and seeing what remains of its past. Sometimes it’s just the barest echo—an RC Cola sign faded almost to white from thousands of summer days, or the shape of a movie theater marquee.
A portion of what remains of Margaret’s Grocery, Vicksburg, Mississippi, SX-70 (2023)
Sometimes it feels ever more urgent to preserve places on film, even as I remember that the world spins, that things changing isn’t inherently bad—in fact it’s often good, it might be wonderful. I made so many photos of the dark front of the Capri in Fondren, wished for a time machine to see it in its heyday.
Its neon flares at night now, a beautiful green-blue, like sunlight flashing off the bottom of the sea. It’s almost euphoric to walk out of the movies with that light flooding the sidewalk, to feel the warm air on your face.
I don’t have a single Polaroid of the theatre with its lights on, not one; but it’s alive, it’s living. What does it need from me?
Ferriday, Louisiana, SX-70 (2023)
“I always suspected photographers must have some kind of particular relationship with mortality,” Thomas Struth said. “Because you have to keep things from dying.”
The other day I drove around looking for flashes of that old faded and fading world, to see what I could help keep from dying. I hadn’t made many photos—a few of a florist shop, one of plastic poinsettias in the winter light, one of handwritten strokes on a shop window. I was looking, as I am always looking, for parts of my life now gone. I was trying to hear those drums again in that little duplex in Starkville in 1993, that noise in the hallway.
On the way out of town the sun was beginning to set, flashes of glorious purple and gold through the pines. I pulled off on the side of the road, tires crunching on gravel. I stood there a long time, shivering. I watched the sky change, shift, darken. Finally there were only headlights. Before all those beautiful colors faded, it looked like this:
Outside of Laurel, Mississippi, as the sun set on January 13th, 2024.
“EVEN THE BRIGHTEST COLOR FADES” is a chapter of GORJUS, a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
This really resonated with me, David. Well written and fantastic images. I'm headed over to your website to see more right now.