Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City

About

Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929 and was drawn to the natural environment from a young age. After studying evolutionary biology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he has spent his career focused on scientific research and teaching, including forty-one years on the faculty of Harvard University. His twenty-five books and more than four hundred mostly technical articles have won him more than a hundred awards in science and letters, including two Pulitzer Prizes, for On Human Nature (1979) and, with Bert Hölldobler, The Ants (1991); the United States National Medal of Science; the Crafoord Prize, given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for fields not covered by the Nobel Prize; Japan’s International Prize for Biology; the Presidential Medal and Nonino Prize of Italy; and the Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society. For his contributions to conservation biology, he has received the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society and the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature. Much of his personal and professional life is chronicled in the memoir Naturalist, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Science in 1995. More recently, Wilson has ventured into fiction, the result being Anthill, published in 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company. Still active in field research, writing, and conservation work, Wilson lives with his wife, Irene, in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Alex Harris was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1949. He graduated in 1971 from Yale University where he also studied photography with Walker Evans. Harris has photographed for extended periods in Cuba, the Inuit villages of Alaska, the Hispanic villages of northern New Mexico, and across the American South. He has taught at Duke University for more than three decades and is a founder there of the Center for Documentary Photography (1979) and the Center for Documentary Studies (1989). Harris launched DoubleTake magazine in 1995 and edited the publication through its first twelve issues. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies at Duke. Harris’s awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, and a Lyndhurst Prize. His book River of Traps, with William deBuys (1990), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Harris’s work is represented in major photographic collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums, including two solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York City. As a photographer and editor, Harris has published fourteen books, including The Idea of Cuba (2007), Red White Blue and God Bless You (1992), and A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood (1987).

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Praise

“The great American biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson has written frequently and beautifully about his Southern childhood, in books like Naturalist (a memoir) and Anthill (a novel). Now this Alabama-born scientist has teamed up with the photographer Alex Harris, who is from Georgia, to deliver a book, ‘WHY WE ARE HERE: MOBILE AND THE SPIRIT OF A SOUTHERN CITY’, about Mobile, Ala., where Mr. Wilson spent much of his childhood.

“The results are excellent if earnest. Mr. Harris’s photographs are inquisitive, and Mr. Wilson’s prose is similarly vivid. About the college where he has taught for many years, Mr. Wilson writes, ‘I found it impossible to fall in love with Harvard.’ He calls it ‘too big, too fragmented, too complicated, and too little endowed with a sense of common heritage.’ At heart, he writes, ‘I am an Alabamian.'”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times (November 23, 2012)

“The American South has always been a place apart, and the South’s great historic port cities—Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston—have themselves always been somewhat exotic implants in that eccentric region. In this book, the great naturalist E. O. Wilson, who grew up in Mobile, and the photographer Alex Harris evoke and explore that exceptional city and its surroundings. Fittingly, they emphasize the striking semitropical flora and fauna of the Mobile area—’The city sits in the middle of the biologically richest part of North America,’ Wilson asserts, home to ‘the greatest diversity of aquatic organisms in America’ and, yikes, some 40 species of snakes—and its astounding setting on the great, wide, nearly landlocked Mobile Bay.

“But both authors concentrate on the city’s equally idiosyncratic culture and history. Founded by the French as the original capital of French Louisiana, in 1702 (Mardi Gras has been celebrated nearly continuously there since), Mobile was subsequently governed by Britain and Spain, before becoming part of the United States in 1813—most records of the city’s first 111 years are archived in Paris, London, Madrid, and Seville. Mobile’s Catholic population was historically the largest in the South, outside of New Orleans (the city has the South’s oldest Catholic college), and Jews played a prominent role in the city’s political and cultural life (Mobile’s congressman in the early 1850s was Jewish, as were two of its mayors).

“For much of its history, the city, located on one of the continent’s great natural harbors, was essentially surrounded on three sides by nearly impenetrable wetlands and forests, which even today, Wilson says, make up ‘one of the largest surviving wildernesses in the eastern United States.’ Mobile’s geography, as Wilson notes, exerted an ‘isolating effect’ on the city’s relationship to the rest of the country, even while making Mobile unusually open to the rest of the world. The upshot, revealed in this uncommonly effective marriage of photographs and text, is a place at once deeply southern and more than a bit foreign.”
―The Atlantic (September 2012): 116.

“Pulitzer Prize–winning naturalist and Harvard professor Wilson (On Human Nature) and acclaimed photographer and Duke University professor Harris (River of Traps) team up to convey the spirit of Mobile, Ala., through text and images. Wilson writes of his childhood in Mobile and recounts the complicated heritage of his hometown in a sprawling essay that weaves personal, social, economic, political, and natural history. . . .Harris’s intimate pictures beautifully capture quotidian moments, offering a context for the diverse characters, lush landscapes, and events, traumatic and joyful, that define Mobile today: a high school football team marches arm-in-arm; a tiger swallowtail hesitates in a verdant meadow; a Civil War re-enactor poses with Confederate memorabilia; two outstretched arms, one black and one white, point toward the infinity of the Gulf of Mexico’s horizon. A hybrid document meant to be as much about ‘the meaning of place as it is about a place itself,’ the book is a thoughtful meditation on community and storytelling that reminds us we will never understand ourselves until we know where we come from.”
―Publishers Weekly