The South

The South was photographed by 2 very different groups of people. Around 1900, commercial photographers made handsome views of New Orleans balconies, Charleston mansions and Mississippi steamboats to sell as prints and postcards. In the 1930s, government photographers came to record poverty, and the South they found was the one the postcards had left out.

Charleston is a good place to start. It was one of the richest cities in colonial America, built on rice, indigo and the labor of enslaved people. The Civil War began in its harbor, when Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. The city was shelled during the war and badly damaged by an earthquake in 1886. Much of the old town survived because Charleston was too poor for decades afterward to tear it down and rebuild.

The river runs through the rest. Pictures from Louisiana and Mississippi show cotton bales stacked on levees, steamboats at the landing and the long, flat country of the Delta. Alabama and South Carolina bring cotton mills and small market towns. Kentucky adds horse country and the hills. Texas, which joined the Union in 1845 after a decade as an independent republic, brings the Alamo in San Antonio, cattle, and later oil.

The New Deal photographers of the Farm Security Administration made some of the best-known pictures of the region. Walker Evans and the writer James Agee spent part of 1936 with tenant farm families in Alabama, work that became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and others photographed sharecroppers, cotton pickers and roadside stores across the Delta and beyond.

In the older views, look at what the camera leaves out and who is standing in the background. Black Southerners often appear at the edges of pictures made for white buyers, working on the wharves or walking past on the street. They were the majority of the population in parts of the region, and the pictures rarely put them in the center.