The South in Color: A Visual Journal

Photographer and scholar Ferris (The Storied South) takes a folkloric look at the New South in the 1960s and 1970s through color photographs that capture the soulful character of a community and the ambition of a young, curious photographer who’s using his camera to better understand the people and place he calls home. He divides the photos into five sections, beginning with warm, exuberant photos of life on the farm where he grew up in Vicsburg, Miss. The next photos explore the larger Mississippi region, with sections on portraits, buildings, handmade color, and roads. The book reveals Ferris’s natural and direct eye, with each section growing in narrative power and scope that “unleashes their visual voice and allows them to achieve a sense of motion and story.” Lyrical and sensitive, the photos reveal a dichotomy between tradition and change, rich and poor, black and white, tracking race relations in the South. Color photos. (Sept.)