Overview

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 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.

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9781469646442

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Reviews

At its core, Matthews' Capturing the South speaks to the asymmetries of documentary power around histories of well-meaning (often self-serving) intentions, cultural exploitation, and subject resistance. . . . Meticulously researched and thoughtfully considered. . . . The energy of Matthews' argument establishes the ethical ambitions of his study in ways that persuasively invite the reader into a consideration about the historical arc and the &64257;eldwork ethics that arguably render the South the most documented American region.--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

""At its core, Matthews' Capturing the South speaks to the asymmetries of documentary power around histories of well-meaning (often self-serving) intentions, cultural exploitation, and subject resistance. . . . Meticulously researched and thoughtfully considered. . . . The energy of Matthews' argument establishes the ethical ambitions of his study in ways that persuasively invite the reader into a consideration about the historical arc and the ï¬\x81eldwork ethics that arguably render the South the most documented American region.""--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Author Information

Scott L. Matthews is assistant professor of history at Florida State College at Jacksonville.

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