Since the moment William Ferris's parents gave their
twelve-year-old son a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in
1954, Ferris passionately began to photograph his world. He has
never stopped. The sixties and seventies were a particularly
significant period for Ferris as he became a pathbreaking
documentarian of the American South. This beautiful, provocative
collection of 100 of Ferris's photographs of the South, taken
during this formative period, capture the power of his color
photography. Color film, as Ferris points out in the book's
introduction, was not commonly used by documentarians during the
latter half of the twentieth century, but Ferris found color to
work in significant ways in the photographic journals 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 at once lyrical and troubling. As Ferris continued to
photograph people and their homes, churches, and blues clubs, their
handmade signs and folk art, and the roads that wound through the
region, divisive racial landscapes become part of the record. A
foreword by Tom Rankin, professor of visual studies and former
director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University,
provides rich insight into Ferris's work.