Photographing Memory: A Visual Exploration of the Past

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The thesis version of this project, Family Ghosts: Kinship, Identity, and Memory in the American South, is preoccupied with kinship primarily as a means of understanding how White descendants of perpetrators of racial violence in rural Southern communities process and conceptualize that violent history. I had not set out for this project with kinship as a focus. Instead, I was primarily interested in history in the sense of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's silencing dualities¹.  I had wanted to ask how the White residents of my research communities were altering historical narratives to suit their purposes, but I found a much more pressing question in why. I found a community in the grip of nostalgia but simultaneously deeply anxious about its own past. The source of this tension between desire and revulsion for various interpretations of local and familial history became infinitely more meaningful than the simple fact that these tensions were present.

The specific theories of kinship this project deals with, the connections to racial violence, gender, and labor, as well as the ethnographic encounters from which these observations spring, are best understood primarily through the thesis itself. My goal with this photo essay is to enrich the images I conjure of this particular community, elaborate on details which were unable to be included in the main body of the thesis, act as a visual companion, and serve as an educational source which is more accessible to those viewing from outside of a strictly academic context.

I conducted the field research for Family Ghosts in Haywood and Lauderdale Counties in West Tennessee. These are both considered rural counties, primarily agricultural in their industry. The specific towns within the Haywood-Lauderdale community are described using their real names, with one key exception. The unincorporated community in which I lived for a portion of my field work, and where a significant amount of my family resides, is so small and so heavily examined in my research that it was necessary for the sake of residential privacy that I use a pseudonym. In the thesis, the town is called Plum Tree, taken from Robert W. Service's 1907 poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee"² . Seth Boyer's musical adaptation of this poem accompanied me on many a long drive through the back roads of West Tennessee's bottom lands.

The choice of the community in which I conducted my field research was heavily considered. My paternal family resides mostly in this community, though I myself was raised a few hours south in Memphis. This combined identity of "City Southern" and "Country Southern" places me firmly in a category Lila Abu-Lughod labels "halfie"³, half inside and half outside the community I study. This unique positionality proved especially beneficial for a project focused on such a tense subject as race. As a Griffin, utilizing the recognizability of my surname in the community, I could make social claims for access to information. As some level of outsider, my need for information and introduction is socially legible to residents.

1. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past : Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.

2. Service, Robert W. “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Songs of a Sourdough, William Briggs, Toronto, Canada, 1907.

3. Abu-Lughod, L. Writing against Culture. Santa Fe, N.M. : School of American Research Press, 1991. Print.

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