In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during
the twentieth century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations
and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including
sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon,
and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and
celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to
reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste
system and exploitative agricultural economy.
Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often
blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried
out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and
civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often
resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into
public symbols. The accumulation of these influential and,
occasionally, controversial documentary images created an enduring,
complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the South
that persists into the twenty-first century.