… It depends on whether we are talking about myth-reality or fact-reality. One exists in our inner lives, one in our outer lives. Sometimes they get swapped. Even artists, whose function is to overlay myth and fact and see what surfaces, get confused.
… Doubtless part of the message is there’s no South left, just America and traces of lost culture. Not long ago in the Dallas airport, I overheard two of the thickest Texas drawls ever God put in a man’s mouth. It happened one belonged to a regulation cowboy with sweat-equity hat, Texas T-shirt, jeans, and boots. Only he was once unequivocally Vietnamese. The other came with a business suit and was once Mexican. They talked stock options.
– Dave Smith
… Since the great fear of Homo sapiens, after the fear of extermination, is of meaninglessness, the results of such witness almost always come as stories — as accounts of creatures in active conflict, with some attention paid to the endless puzzles of cause and purpose, start and destination.
– Reynolds Price
It is still hot as midafternoon. The sky is a clear rinsed cobalt after the rain. Wet pine growth reflects the sunlight like steel knitting needles. The grove steams and smells of turpentine. Far away the thunderhead, traveling fast, humps over on the horizon like a troll. Directly above, a hawk balances on a column of air rising from the concrete geometry. Not a breath stirs.
– Walker Percy quote from Love in the Ruins (1971) used within one of the essays
… Three weeks after that march, a bomb placed beneath Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist church exploded during Sunday school. It decapitated one girl and killed three others; that night, two more black youths were beaten to death. I photographed one of the girls in her coffin, and at age twenty-one I was so sensitive I tried not to look through the camera as I made the picture. The girl was fourteen.
– Danny Lyon
… What then, we may well ask, is the myth of the New South? Who is the Southerner? If you live in the traditional region you have only got to drive your car maximum five minutes in any direction and you will bump into whichever kind of us you were wanting to prove existed.
… Art says here’s the myth and here’s the reality. Now you feel of the thing and decide for yourself.
– Dave Smith
All of the above are taken from separate essays (though both Dave Smith quotes are from the same essay) in Aperture 115, (1989), the theme of which was New Southern Photography: Between Myth and Reality.
-Julie
Apparently the term “New South” has been around since the Civil War. I don’t remember it when I was growing up in Chattanooga as a term of importance. I also don’t remember any personal stigmata because I was from the South. Maybe it was there behind the drawn blinds of the Boston Puritans.
As with many societies, for a while, the South was dependent on a single industry, textiles. Ironically, the loss of this industry to Vietnam and China is for the same reason that it came to the South in the first place, cheap labor. (Of course air conditioning played a part.)
It will be interesting to see how things go now that the South has lost its clout politically.
Comment by Dr. C. — July 12, 2009 @ 12:26 pm