Within the everyday, parts of the American South have the palpability of a Jerusalem, with a psychic residue that accompanies the air. There are times in the South when you would believe the world is flat, and not spinning, and that it’s O.K.
I moved from Washington to Hale County, Ala., in 2009, replacing freelance anxiety with a steady job and a slower pace of life in a city of 2,700 people. I went to work at a job-training and high school equivalency program, helping young people whose lives presented consistent emotional and mental exhaustion. The support would stretch far beyond the Monday through Friday eight-hour workday, but always embedded in the events of my life there would be space to make and think art.
In the moment, time had this physical patience about it, a haptic lull, but looking back after three years, it seemed to have flown by. Newer people arrived and others left. The novelty of the historic South gave way to the quotidian, almost in the while-you’re-not-looking way that condensation appears. I would see the Alabama Power guy propped by his truck practically every morning on my blocklong walk to work. The comforting routine of it just marked my reality. We never exchanged names, but I’ll always love how people generally acknowledge every person who passes them.
This became my life, with both natural and social cycles on automatic. I still remember when our entire G.E.D. program gathered on a corner on Greensboro Avenue in white-bright census shirts and pink-brimmed census hats, our timidity transformed by uniforms into authentic pride. My buddy Willie and I coached the Greensboro High School basketball team that year, and it deservedly won the state championship. How great were those nights we’d twist our bones at the Elks Lodge or to Nico’s guitar in garages and side yards around town! I remember when the 2011 tornadoes nearly took off our heads and brought the sound of outer space to Main Street. Broken trees told human survival stories from Sawyerville that day. Dixie animism’s alive and well.
In this project, South County, Ala., the oldest image, “Dakesha and Marquise,” was made in 2012, as I wondered in a daydream’s light how to unburden the African-American body and skin. The problem of representation had become a conceptual challenge. I wanted to engage the photographic narrative of the historic South, but provide its representation some breathing room and loosen the hold of iconic meaning.
South County, Ala., is figmental. To direct these happenings I would rely on the spontaneous, a withdrawal of inspiration from the subconscious, and consider my personal knowledge of the collaborator. The subjects responded to their photographs with a grin-smile and some words of approval, but more silence and staring than anything. Ida Mae told me I wasn’t a good photographer because her street portrait was nontraditional. I reminded her I was working from an idea.
Most, though, have gone from chuckling at my unexpected request for something offbeat to asking when we were going to take another. The project also seeks to quietly address the function of skin as it feeds our imagination. Every subconscious withdrawal, south of spontaneity, seemed to be traceable to something – their experience, my experience, my projections, my optimism, cynicism, some hybridized brain deposit from before. South County, Ala., is where a plural gaze plays.
I’m for an art that tries to erase the horizon. With my 4×5 camera upright, swinging the three-leg, glass-nosed puppet into position, I daydream about a postmodern South, of melanin liberation and a less profit-centered humanity.
I may pay rent to a friend for my place in Greensboro, but the South’s my landlord; and I’m trapped in its stomach trying to get to its brain. Here, I see butterflies with Confederate flag-grown wings and minstrel vestiges of Daddy Rice collecting dough. I can’t move because I’m stuck in Aunt Jemima’s syrup.
RaMell Ross is a Sundance Institute New Frontier artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and is currently in production on “Hale County,” a feature-length documentary film that employs immersive cinema aesthetics to explore the lives of two African-American men in the historic South.
Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.
