I have lived the entirety of my life in Mississippi and Alabama. While I love to make photographs in other places, my dominant aesthetic is rooted in what I just think of as here.
Texarkana, Arkansas, Polaroid SX-70 (all photos 2021)
The meditative sanctuary of the past year expanded what here was. I’m so obsessed with Mississippi, with the very soil and swamp of it, you would think that my cameras didn’t work once I crossed the Mississippi.
Warren, Ark., SX-70
But over the past year my weekend explorations curved further into Louisiana and Arkansas, deeper south, further west, fine let’s go north.
Lincoln Parish, Louisiana
Not every place made sense when I first visited, as it might be overcast, or too dark. Sometimes you might have color in the camera when you really need black & white, or vice versa.1 Even then I would get excited—I’m scouting, I would say to myself as I turned on the wipers and headlights. I’m on a factfinding mission and maybe could come back here next month, but a few hours earlier in the day. I was just trying to be in the world: so I explored.
El Dorado, Ark.
In doing so I got to experience so many new places, and returned with fresh eyes to others. And as I spend more time doing this, the more it all seems to be connected in ways I never saw before, each place evocative of another—maybe hundreds or even thousands of miles away.2
Lewisburg, Ark.
There are a score of reasons why I love the band X. I learned about them first visually from Jaimie Hernandez through Love and Rockets, because Maggie and Hopey and their friends were wearing Germs armbands and Dictators shirts and X was in the air like a fine mist. It was only later I heard them, from a friend who was a dj at WMSV in Starkville, who had graduated and was moving back to Conway. He gave me this little sampler Elektra had put out to promote Beyond and Back. It starts with rippers from Los Angeles and Wild Gift, Exene howling about how desperate they all were.
The Arlington, Hot Springs, Ark.
But just a couple of songs later there were plaintive, heartbreaking demos of songs that could only be called country. John Doe was singing about how it was over with the person he loved, while admitting he “don’t have the strength to go.”
Lewisburg, Ark.
“She gives me her cheek / When I want her lips,” he howled, and something unlocked inside of me. Until then, I had no idea you could be both punk and country, didn’t know you couldn’t get caught on the wrong side of that line. X taught me there wasn’t a line at all, there was a continuum. X was the skeleton key.3
Texarkana, Ark.
When I was in high school there was a dollar theatre in Birmingham. It showed movies that were long gone out of the fancy place by the mall in Hoover, or even the twin screen by Western Hills. Maybe there were good things it showed but it was normally some depressing semi-comedy by someone who had been on SNL once. But there was never anything to do and you could burn an afternoon watching movies with your friends and heckling the screen.
Arkansas, Location not recorded
This one time they were showing a movie that just didn’t add up; it didn’t know whether it was a comedy or trying to make a serious statement or what, and the lead was this kind of nice but boring guy who had been on a TV show I liked when I was little, although I didn’t really get it, but liked the theme song a whole lot. I was baffled by the other lead, who I did like a lot, but played three different characters, and actually somehow looked different each time even though it was the same actress. The way she talked and moved was so radically changed it was like a different person.
Ford in Fordyce, Ark.
The movie kind of flubs around the whole time, and then gets super cringey at the end (whether you are sixteen in 1991 or sixteen in 2021) but whatever, it was a dollar. And as they’ve said since they made up dollars, you get what you pay for.
But there is this moment, in the middle of this thing that doesn’t know what it is. There is this one moment. And it did not matter to that sixteen year old, 231 miles and 30 years from here, but it seems to matter so much this morning, this sunny Sunday morning.
I mean today I think you should go someplace you’ve never been, or plan on going someplace you’ve never been, realize how big this world is, how beautiful, how big your life is, how beautiful.
Fragment of a a theatre (now a hardware store) in Fordyce, Arkansas. It was at this location, ca. 1926, where a thirteen year old boy from Moro Bottom wrestled a bear.
THIS MORNING I’m listening to Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood and More Fun in the New World by X . . . bought the other two collections of poetry by Catherine Pierce because Danger Days is just so incredible . . . went to Lemuria yesterday to pick up one thing and walked out with a stack of Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett because John Evans got a hold of me . . . currently reading the new book by Rachel Cusk, Second Place, which if you like it is very Cusky (narrative formed as a long letter to a friend, main characters referred only to by their initials, undescribed and obscure loss, deeply rooted longing, restrained but rich use of words, etc. etc.) . . . visited the Mississippi Museum of Art for the first time in a while and was thrilled to see some old favorites (Jason Bouldin’s reverential portrait of Medgar Evers and some blue crabs by Walter Anderson) and pieces I had never seen before (a beautiful golden (!!) platter by Pup and Lee McCarty, a faded red barn by Bill Egg, a tiny Palmist by Mr. Christenberry, a giant piece by Sally Mann from Deep South) . . . it’s Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday tomorrow! Talk about a life, so big.
For this reason Maude Schuyler Clay used to drive around with two different Rolleiflexes—one with color film, and one with b&w.
I was once headed to upstate New York with a friend to go apple picking (this is a thing people do and it is awesome). En route we stopped in Newburgh, New York, and were just driving around downtown. Suddenly I had the most undeniable sense of déjà vu—it was so powerful, it then spilled over into presque vu. The memory finally shook loose and I said “this is what Birmingham looked like when I grew up. This is what it looked like in the eighties.” And I swear it looked more like downtown Birmingham I grew up with then the city itself does now.
As a cousin to this memory, I was once in the New York Transit Museum, and a person about my age was talking to his elementary school age kid in one of the restored cars—I think an R-15. He had this amazing look on his face, that almost recognition look when you see someone you had a crush on growing up, and can almost see them, see them in the way you felt when you’d see them walk by the lockers in the hallway. “Oh my God,” he blurted, “it’s that it’s so clean! I didn’t recognize it because it’s so clean!”
If you have never listened to X’s albums, I think going chronologically is still the best road down the highway; my favorites shift over time. To really knock your hair back, watch The Unheard Music as your introduction—the band is just all so beautiful, and the music is alive. The best deal going is that you can buy the majority of the the X discography on Bandcamp for $35 and change.
Agreed -- Lewisburg is an instant classic. Great post, David!
six months too late, I figured out how to comment, because I had to do so. That photographs of the flag and building in Lewisburg blew my mind. So good. As always. You are so good.