Since 1983 David Wharton has photographed the twelve states that define
the American South, focusing his attention on rural and small-town
culture, vernacular architecture and landscape, the role of religion in
Southern life, and the relationship between Southerners, their natural
surroundings, and the communities they have built. Small Town South is
the result of Wharton's travels through a region that extends from
Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas in the west to Virginia and the Carolinas
in the east, from Kentucky and Tennessee in the north to Florida in the
south, with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia forming the region's
center in between.
No other photographer has devoted so much time and attention to
recording this distinctive American place. The 115 duotone photographs
which serve as the book's core, combined with the author's insightful
text, convey an overall sense of what the small Southern town has become
and looks like during the early twenty-first century. Wharton organizes
his study into thematic portfolios that address themes such as the
intersection of tradition and modernity, local commemorations of the
past, the omnipresence of the church in town life, the difficulties of
making a living in the New World economy, the look of Main Street, the
display of public murals and memorials, and the iconographic unfolding
of community values.
Many have likened Wharton's photographic eye and approach to the work of
other photographic masters of the South, including Walker Evans, Eudora
Welty, William Christenberry, Shelby Lee Adams, Alex Harris, Rob Amberg,
and Martha A. Strawn. And, just as we turn to those artists to help us
understand and reckon with Southern history and culture, we now can look
to David Wharton as another pioneer photographer of the Southern small
town in all its simplicity and complexity. (See the publisher's website
for further information: http: //gftbooks.com/books_Wharton.html
