I’m very pleased and excited to be a part of the exhibition opening at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia, this weekend. The exhibit is titled Reckonings and Reconstructions and is work from the Do Good Fund, a Columbus, Georgia-based non-profit that collects southern documentary photographs from the region and loans them to libraries, schools, galleries and museums. The collection now encompasses over 800 photographs. The University of Georgia Press has produced a book with the same title.
As part of the exhibition, some photographers were asked to comment on a photograph of theirs that is in the show. Below is what I wrote to accompany my image, Farm Estate Auction, Bishopville, SC 1987.
Farm Estate Auction, Bishopville, SC 1987
In 1987 when I made this photograph, I was working as staff photographer and director of communication for the Rural Advancement Fund (RAF), a non-profit, farm advocacy organization working in the two Carolinas. One of my duties was to document the farm crisis in rural America that had forced thousands of family farmers into bankruptcy and off of their farms. My involvement with photography had grown out my social action work in the 1960s and I viewed photography as a tool for social change. My work with RAF provided an opportunity to act on that belief.
I had traveled to Bishopville SC, to spend time with a farmer who was struggling to stay in business. My visits with farm families usually took the form of me hanging out for a period of days. I was interested in the day-to-day life on these farms and in their communities, sensing that in the ordinary we found the universal. In the course of my stay in rural South Carolina, we went to a farm estate auction where the farmer hoped to pick up equipment for an affordable price.
I wandered around the grounds making photographs of faces in the crowd and items on the sale tables, nothing very exciting. But when the auctioneer held up the painting of the farms’ original farmhouse, instinct took over and I sat down in front of him and exposed a half dozen negatives.
For me this image tells an obvious story—an object being sold at auction—factual evidence that offers something recognizable and believable. But knowing this was an item being sold as part of the dissolution of the farm gave it a different meaning. Not only was the painting of the farmhouse being sold, along with the farm itself, but the image of the farm, its way of life, its history, and its day-to-day were being sold, too. It is this hidden meaning, one less specific and more universal, that speaks to a culture being dissolved, which gives this photograph its power and resiliency.