$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover/PLC with jacket
184 pages with 130 duotone photographs by the author
11.0″ x 9.0″ landscape/horizontal
ISBN: 978-1–938086–82–3
This is the third book in Wharton’s Trilogy of the American South (2021), ISBN 978-1-938086-90-8
Published in March 2022
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place and University of Mississippi’s College of Liberal Arts and Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
by David Wharton
with an afterword by Steve Yarbrough
Winner of 2023 Gold Medal IPPY Award for Best Regional Book of Non-Fiction for the South
The American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is largely connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes, revealing much about local life, both past and present, and suggesting that we make connections between the two.
David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books—Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way.
In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton’s magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.
About
About the Author
David Wharton was born in New York City in 1947 and grew up in New Jersey. He attended Colgate University, where he earned his B.A. in English in 1969. After an extended trip through Andean South America in 1974, he resolved to teach himself how to use a camera and make photography his life’s work. From 1976 to 1978 he worked as a photojournalist for the Willamette Valley Observer in Eugene, Oregon. He then entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his M.F.A. in photography in 1986 and his Ph.D. in American studies in 1994. He taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 1996 to 1998 and, from 1999 until his death on September 25, 2022, was Director of Documentary Studies and an assistant professor of Southern studies in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe, and he is the author of a trilogy of books on the American South: Roadside South (2022), The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016), winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for photography, and Small Town South (2012), winner of the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for photography, all published by George F. Thompson Publishing. His first book, The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), set the table for Wharton’s Trilogy of the American South.
About the Contributor
Steve Yarborough was born and raised in Mississippi and currently is a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston. His novels include The Unmade World (Unbridled Books, 2018), winner of the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, The Realm of Last Chances (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), Safe from the Neighbors (Alfred A Knopf, 2010), The End of California (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), Prisoner of War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), which was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Oxygen Man (MacMurray & Beck, 1999), winner of the 1999 California Book Award, 2000 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction, and 2000 Mississippi Authors Award. In 2010, he also received the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence.
Slide Show
Praise
“David Wharton’s evocative photographs capture defining aspects of the American South, documenting haunting farmlands and wild landscapes and edgy juxtapositions of human-made and natural details, both beautiful and ordinary, “off-kilter and occassionally funny.”
—Rachel Jagareski, FOREWORD: Reviews of Indie Books (full review pdf)
“The absence of people looms large in David Wharton’s latest collection of photographs. Even though his images are brimming with the detritus of late-stage Southern life, he has almost entirely de-populated his scenes—an active photographic decision that makes the all-too-familiar South appear unusual at last. Indeed, this strangeness comes as a welcome relief. It separates his work from prevailing Southern photographs that often leverage a sense of loss to make tritely documentary or moralizing points. In Wharton’s unforgettable photographs, human absence becomes a palpable presence, one that dashes Southern mythology by grounding it in a newly visible place.”
—Seth Feman, Curator of Photography and Deputy Director Art and Interpretation, Chrysler Museum of Art
“Roadside South completes and complements David Wharton’s stunning trilogy interpreting the rural South. Alive to the region’s paradoxes and incongruities as well as its struggles, strengths, and aspirations, his photographs challenge us to reconsider our understanding of a region at once archaic, dynamic, and complicated. His images of the Southern vernacular reveal the work of a master craftsman, among the very finest documentary photographers of our time.”
—Richard B. Megraw, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and author of Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana
“A singular sense of place forms; Wharton’s view of an eclectic rural Southern identity is conveyed with aplomb. Many of these black-and-white photographs highlight texture and play with strong shadows and light, as with images of hay, cotton bales, weathered armchairs, and a decapitated deer head viewed against stark empty fields and packed dirt lanes.”
—Michelle Schingler, FOREWORD: Reviews of Indie Books
My Place
In 1983, on the first of many drives between my new home in Austin, Texas, and my parents’ house in North Carolina, I made a detour to visit Oxford, Mississippi. I had read most of William Faulkner’s novels over the years and wanted to see the town that inspired the fictional Jefferson, the county seat of Faulkner’s richly imagined Yoknapatawpha County. Oxford was further out of the way than I expected, and by the time I got there I was feeling hurried. So I parked the car, took a five-minute walk around the courthouse square, got back in the car, and drove away. I had no reasonable expectation of ever being in Oxford again.
And, now, I’ve lived in Oxford for fourteen years. I came here more as a matter of circumstance than by choice, though I’m happy to have ended up here. There’s much to like about Oxford. Most of the world knows it (if they know it at all) as the home of William Faulkner, the site of the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss” in local parlance), and the backdrop to James Meredith’s 1962 struggle to integrate the university—one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. All of these legacies draw visitors to town, and most learn, often to their surprise, that Oxford has an excellent bookstore, a sophisticated college-town populace, and several good restaurants.
But I have come to know the town differently, more intimately, and on a daily basis. I know it will rarely take me more than five minutes to get from my house to my office at the university. I know enough to stay home (or get out of town entirely) on those six autumn weekends every year when the town quadruples in size because of a home football game. I know what time to leave and what route to take in order to avoid church traffic on my weekly Sunday morning trips to the grocery store. I know that much of the summer is going to be stiflingly hot and humid, that fall is usually gentle and sweet, that winter will allow the use of a fireplace for six weeks or so, and that spring will be a long, drawn-out succession of flowers, as various trees and bushes bloom, one after another. I know enough to stay away from the courthouse square on weekend nights when the university is in session because of the large number of students who will be in the town’s many bars, celebrating their freedom from the parental restraints of home. I know Oxford’s a good town to walk in—to the Square for a cup of coffee or a beer or to browse the front tables at Square Books—or a little further to Faulkner’s grave or Rowan Oak, his restored antebellum home.
But, most of all, I like Oxford because it’s easy to get out of. A five-minute drive in any direction will have me in the country—the real country: not the large-lot subdivisions with big brick houses and acres of manicured green grass but actual land and space not always made pretty but shaped and made useful by many people over many years. Scattered throughout are hamlets like Abbeville, Lafayette Springs, Paris, Toccopola, and Yocona—each with a post office and perhaps a combined grocery store and gas station, a church or two, sometimes an elementary school and/or a pre-fab volunteer fire department building. Half an hour’s drive from Oxford will get me to towns like Holly Springs (north), Pontotoc (east), Bruce (southeast), Water Valley (south), and Batesville (west)—all except Bruce county seats and each with a history, culture, and society peculiarly its own. They are, no doubt, what Oxford would look like without the university.
I feel lucky to live in the cultured, historical Oxford, where people concern themselves with books, ideas, and civic improvement. I also feel lucky to have easy access to places where people don’t often (if ever) think about William Faulkner, the University of Mississippi, or which coffee house serves the best espresso.
Copyright © 2013 David Wharton. All rights reserved.