The South in Color

One man’s power to capture his world in all its colours, surprises, and troubles.

Since the moment William Ferris’s parents gave their twelve-year-oldson a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, Ferris passionatelybegan to photograph his world. He has never stopped. The sixtiesand seventies were a particularly significant period for Ferris as he becamea pathbreaking documentarian of the American South. This beautiful,provocative collection of 100 of Ferris’s photographs of the South, takenduring this formative period, capture the power of his color photography.Color film, as Ferris points out in the book’s introduction, was not commonlyused by documentarians during the latter half of the twentieth century,but Ferris found color to work in significant ways in the photographicjournals he created of his world in all its permutations and surprises.

The volume opens with images of his family’s farm and its workers—family and hired—southeast of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The images are atonce lyrical and troubling. As Ferris continued to photograph people andtheir homes, churches, and blues clubs, their handmade signs and folk art,and the roads that wound through the region, divisive racial landscapesbecome part of the record. A foreword by Tom Rankin, professor of visualstudies and former director of the Center for Documentary Studies atDuke University, provides rich insight into Ferris’s work.