An image I find myself returning to over and over again is a photograph by RaMell Ross titled Dream Catcher (2014). The photograph pictures a young boy lying down on a chain-link fence, staring up at the sky as if enchanted and transfixed by a spell. The photograph was shot at midday in Hale County, Alabama. The sky is overcast in a haze of clouds and the trees surrounding the boy are bare. Ross’s camera stands back from the scene to get a better view, yet he does not include the actual sky, which rivets the boy’s gaze. The image is one of daydream and reverie, but the content of the boy’s dream remains elusive. From our perspective, his vision evades the world, ultimately unknowable to any passing glance.
RaMell Ross, Dream Catcher, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Dream Catcher was included in an exhibition, Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross, held at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2021. Its subsequent release as a monograph with MACK in 2023 introduces a provisional quality that distinguishes it from a typical photobook. This provisionality is accentuated by the binding of Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body with metal screws, a choice mirroring the aesthetics of an official report. The inclusion of metal screws underscores its status as a living document, as this binding provides the flexibility to potentially add and remove pages at a later date. This expeditious approach sets it apart from the usual hardbound presentation of small edition photobooks, or even museum catalogs.
Dream Catcher is from Ross’s series South County, AL (A Hale County) (2012 – 2014). The title of the series is informative since South County, Alabama, is not a real place, whereas the real place of Hale County is put in brackets. This deliberate choice grounds the work in the imaginary — the fictitious South County, Alabama — while maintaining a connection to the real Hale County. It serves to sustain the tension between the real and the imaginary, fact and fiction, highlighting the extent to which the boundaries of our imagination shape our perception of a region, city, or neighborhood, yet always grounded in the tangible realities of a place.
One can only speculate, but perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many figures from South County, AL (A Hale County) are photographed lost in thought, pictured as though they are caught in a dream or reverie. Much like Ross’s photograph of Dream Catcher, the other images from Ross’s catalog conjure a similar vision: a young woman reclining on a back stoop, a young man lounging on a bench, a man using the flatbed of a pickup truck as a temporary bed, while his friend finds respite in the truck’s shadow.
RaMell Ross, Brothers Z, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
In these photographs, Ross positions himself at the unbridgeable perspective of the middle-distance. This perspective creates the impression that he has been welcomed into the individual’s world while also granting them the freedom to dream and pursue their activities independently, allowing them to simply be there without the camera’s overt guidance. Although his figures often appear absorbed in thought, their absorption is frequently obscured or veiled, whether by a hand, a bush, or a single branch. For those who do confront the camera directly, they do so with an unyielding and obstinate look.
Before his exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Ross’s work gained traction for his critically acclaimed documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). The film garnered widespread recognition for its unique approach to documentary filmmaking, offering a poetic portrayal of life in the American South, particularly focusing on the Black community’s experience in Hale County, Alabama. Hale County, This Morning, This Evening is not a traditional documentary in the sense of a linear structure, voiceover, or clear narrative arc, but rather, it presents a series of vignettes and moments that summon the everyday experiences, dreams, and challenges of the people in the community. The film received critical acclaim and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019.
Within the history of the American documentary, Hale County exerts a surprising yet distinct magnetic attraction. In the 1930s and 1940s, white writers and photographers, often employed by the federal government and NY magazines, documented the consequences of the collapse of the cotton industry in the South. One point of focus was Hale County, Alabama. Notable figures such as James Agee, Walker Evans, and Jack Delano were all drawn to the region. Evans and Agee’s collaboration resulted in the 1941 publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which significantly altered the county’s image, especially after its belated 1960 reissue. Evans and Agee’s book became a sacred text for a new generation seeking cultural authenticity and inspiration in the rural South, shifting the focus from white plantation owners to the faces of the impoverished white rural population.
For a handout published by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the historian Scott L. Matthews writes of how Ross’s work breaks with this tradition. Matthews highlights Ross’s ability to liberate himself from this influence after residing in Hale County for three years, outlining the ways in which Ross’s work escapes from the spell of history and genre, illuminating the lives of Hale County’s Black residents.
RaMell Ross, Open, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
To make the film, Ross accumulated more than 13,000 hours of footage, condensing it into a concise 76-minute runtime. In a 2019 interview with Dissent Magazine, he highlights that the project’s formation and development were linked to the gradual accumulation of social experience through time. In surrendering to time’s accretion, the images began to speak to one another:
“I think it’s especially true that, in the context of filming African-American communities, no one looks long enough for new meaning to emerge. Or to put it another way, with the necessary and urgent task of depicting and expressing the black community’s traumas, what is lost is everything else. So my process was simple: use time. And once the collection of unexpected events and images grew large enough, they began to speak to each other, in their form, their shapes and colors and sounds; and placing them beside each other began to create new meanings—meanings the isolated image couldn’t conjure on its own.”
Hale County This Morning, This Evening, can be considered an experimental documentary insofar as the film questions the limits and potentials of what documentary images can be and what the genre can do. In this spirit, Ross mobilizes the genre to simultaneously marshall his doubt and faith in the mode, serving as a means to question the nature of how one perceives and comprehends the act of seeing and knowing. His photographs for Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, can be understood as an extension of Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, reconfiguring Black experience as a site of photographic plurality, contingency, and indeterminacy.
Within the history of photography, Black experience is overburdened in the history of the medium, insofar as it bears an incredible weight as soon as it appears on the scene. On Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, Ross has remarked on this aspect in the following terms:
“The south is the [center] of the black experience. It’s where we were put, it’s the origin of the image, from minstrel shows to flyers of a lynching, that represent what it means to be a black person. That was a great belief system to start investigating the relationship between what being black is and the reproduction of that blackness via film and photography.”
Think of the racist daguerreotypes photographed by Louis Agassiz of enslaved Black people in the United States in the 1850s. Or the photographic surveys of the inner-city commissioned by white officials in the early twentieth century to depict conditions of degeneracy, waywardness, or criminality. In these cases, photography was mobilized as a mode of illustration, as a physical embodiment of a discourse, an index of a typology, a record of a dominant and racist ideology. In these instances, photography provided, in Ross’s words, the “material proof of the racial lie.”
Ross’s work begins with a question: what if there was a mode of photographic work that suspends and displaces this overburdened condition? Or, to put it in terms closer to the artist’s own framing: “Is there a mode of representation that allows for infinite possibility?”
The apparent timelessness of Ross’ photographs, and his recurrent evocation of moments of ephemeral beauty, awe, and reverie in South County AL (A Hale County), is an attempt to suspend this overburdened condition. These moments are not marshaled under the banner of aesthetic or political reconciliation. They are mobilized to unburden the image and restore a sense of indeterminacy to their presence. Ross’s moments of beauty are intractable and unresolvable. What his images reveal are not-yet-articulated structures of feeling.
RaMell Ross, Daniel, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
The dreamlike quality of Ross’s photographs makes it impossible to construct a narrative about where his figures are coming from, about where they are going, or even about what they are doing — these sociological questions are greeted and returned with a fugitive presence: blank stares, sidelong glances, lost profiles. This evasive quality counters recent interpretations of the artist’s photographic work. The writer Rebecca Bengal has read Ross’s awareness of time and his close familiarity with his subjects as a means to picture them as though they are “seen whole.” However, something more nuanced and subtle seems to be at work in the image.
RaMell Ross, Here, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Perhaps Ross’s work is better understood as reticent and reserved, with the photographer and sitter both purposefully withholding something. Ross is a co-conspirator in the figure’s concealment, shrouding them behind a cloud of dust, a bush, or a bus seat. From our perspective, it is not always clear what the figure is doing in Ross’s images, as their thoughts and intentions cannot be fully discerned or inferred from the photograph, or even illuminated by the work’s caption. The photograph of reverie is closer to an ecstatic experience, an experience where the subject is taken outside of themselves, slipping into a state that is beyond their own condition, outside of their own control.
RaMell Ross, Ron, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Within the medium of photography, contingency revives a sense of the unknown and infuses the figure with a sense of the unthought. In his interview with Dissent Magazine, Ross remarks on how much Hale County, This Morning, This Evening was about opening himself up to the unpredictability of the world: “I don’t believe I would have made this film — perhaps I would not have made a film at all — if not for the aleatory elements. I went by chance, tagging along […].” Although Ross could not predict what would happen in committing to the making of the film, there is faith in the idea that the world will eventually reveal something mysterious and miraculous. All the filmmaker had to do was show up. Ross makes reference to this condition in the opening salvo to the Ogden Museum handout for Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body. He introduces his photographs with the following words:
“These photographs confound definitive interpretations; they preclude confident statements about people and a place some think they understand, but don’t. Dakesha and Marquise, Ladrewya and Michaelangelo, Ron and Daniel, Shaequan and Kami, Antonio and Jodice, Ida Mae and Man. They appear here as they are: holy mysteries.”
Ross’s project pictures moments and individuals in a manner which complicates a singular interpretation. This approach gives rise to what he calls the “holy mystery” of presence, where the power of his images lies in their unknowability. In this sense, to speak of Ross’s work as breaking a spell of tradition, in Scott L. Matthews’s sense of the term, is only one part of the story. Matthews’s discussion of “breaking spells” misses the “holy mystery” that Ross mentions in this opening statement. To think of his images in a different frame, one must consider how his photographs cast a spell. In this mode, the image is reimagined as an act of enchantment, a conjuring of place, a summoning of a presence, the creation of a world. The photographer evokes a mystery, for the image to remain a mystery.
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While I was searching for a reference point to anchor my reading of Ross’s images, I turned to a short piece of writing he wrote in the Spring 2019 edition of the journal, Film Quarterly. The essay bears the title, “Renew the Encounter,” and reads as a manifesto for a new type of contemporary photography.
A selection of his text reads as follows:
Develop a photographic sensibility.
Make the camera an organ. Take it into your body. Shoot toward a personal poetics.
[…]
Fail at representing blackness.
The act of representing is the act of reproducing. The less black the more black.
Consider the indecisive moment.
Free the reproduced event from the essentialization of narratives and story.
Find the epic-banal.
Bring elation to the experience of blackness. Acknowledge the magnificence of the universe’s encasement in the social, awaiting other forms.
Lean toward experience creation.
Most logic and blackness are in constant debate. Create the personal-poetic experience of blackness, renew the encounter.
Future commentators on Ross’s work will make the mistake of reading “Renew the Encounter” as an interpretive key to his images. This might work only in part. It might be more instructive to read the text as a provisional document, a working through of a set of problems, similar to how notes are jotted down in a diary. It serves as a reminder of how to be, how to work, how to persevere, and how to remain true to a vision, a cause, a belief, a location, and a state of mind. It is an experiment in both thought and deed.
RaMell Ross, Gahhh Damn, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2018 – 2022), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Throughout the text, Ross dwells in the contradiction. A statement is often declared, and then in the next sentence, this statement is subverted, undermined, or even questioned. One line reads: “Embrace contradiction.” The next sentence says: “Dismiss contradiction.” Or: “The less black is the more black.” This oscillation in intent and motivation returns us back to how Ross works with the genre of documentary, mobilizing the form to question the capacities and limitations of the genre. For Ross, documentary is another word for contradiction. It can be understood as a search of a special kind — what Ross calls “a truthful way of looking.”
RaMell Ross, Giving Tree, from A South County AL (A Hale County), (2012 – 2014), from Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
What is a truthful way of looking? Truth is a complicated business. It does not always hinge on right or wrong, fiction or nonfiction. Photographic truth, moreover, is just as hard to pin down. Perhaps any glimpse of truth is only uncovered in the provisionality of the moment, figured in Ross’s photographs of a child using metal fencing as a hammock, three teenagers sitting on a swing set lost in the moment, or a man and two children playing basketball on a grassy field — a sum of experience that can only contribute to what Ross calls the “epic banal.” In the domain of photography, the epic banal is pictured by Ross in all of those moments of awe, wonder, and reverie, channeling an experience wherein the quotidian appears as if it were pulsating with an unseen, electrical current.
“Renew the Encounter” was not included in the catalog to Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body. Instead, Ross has composed a new text, “Slangless,” which echoes the voice and style of his previous manifesto, but with an explicit focus on photographing the South. “Slangless” reads like a litany, a repetition of words, “to be,” as though it were an incantation. The text is written like a poem with distinct points of focus marked in italics: The Case, Perception, Critique, Judgement, Aim, Personal Approach, and Possibility.
“The Case,” the first line reads. “To be a photograph of the American South. To be an image that regards the Historic South’s impression. To be an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, a memory… of that physical and nonphysical region. To feel of the South, and Southern, like an accent can. To ring the Southern bell. Gonggg. To be like infrared; resonating below the Mason-Dixon line.”
What is refreshing about Ross’s text is that it does not shy away from the clichés of photographic work. Whether the work is linked to an index, a document, a testament, a moment, a facsimile, a reference, a distillation, or a memory, these concepts have experienced a recurring cycle of either being considered obsolete or reevaluated as enduringly significant throughout the relatively brief history of the medium. Ross’s methodology defies the prevailing doxa that dictates a photographer should adhere to a single, uniform definition or style. What distinguishes his work is his willingness to accept the contradiction, to renew the encounter, and to unburden the image as a means to approach the South as both a subject and a mode, but also as a guide and horizon.
In the penultimate section titled “Personal Approach,” Ross employs a metaphor of insatiable hunger to convey his desire to craft fresh imagery of the American South. Ross utilizes this metaphor of hunger and digestion to underscore his engagement with the visual and cultural elements of the South, fully metabolizing them into his photographic work. Continuing with the metaphor, he envisages the creative residue of this process as a fertile “excrement,” which will form a solid foundation for generating new images of the South. His ultimate ambition is to employ this creative residue as the cornerstone for a lasting installation within the Library of Congress — where other historical, documentary images of Hale County reside — envisioning it as fertile ground from which a new image of the South can take root and flourish.
Ross’s text ends with a short section, Possibility, with the line: “To be a photograph of the American South and be liberated, having known death.” Perhaps this is the highest form of perception — to see the world as it appears without you existing.
I am struck by this last line and its relation to the opening image from Ross’s new addition to the series South County, AL (A Hale County) (2018 – 2022). The series is bracketed by what looks like identical photographs of the soil of Hale County. Although seemingly identical, the images are titled differently, Hale’s Angels and Doing Language. The two titles are instructive. In the photograph, Ross stares down at the scene to picture the ground upon which his camera is pointed. No figures populate these two photographs. What the viewer is witness to are only furtive markings on the ground.
Hale County soil is distinctive for its rich red color, primarily due to the presence of iron oxide, also known as rust. The warm and humid climate of the region accelerates the weathering of rocks and minerals, which releases iron into the soil. Literally, you can think of the soil as rusting. Despite the elemental nature of these images and the emphasis on the soil upon which death and dust reside, there remains something ethereal and mysterious to their framing. Ross treats the markings in the soil as a language of angels, akin to how children make snow angels after a fresh snowstorm. These are marks of unknown legibility.
In Hale’s Angels and Doing Language, it is as though the earth itself has a language, a means of expressing itself and bearing witness to the afterlife of human presence. Photography is unique in uncovering the world’s infinite plurality and contingency, leaving the viewer to sift through the fragments. Ross’s photographs invite the viewer to read the traces of the photograph as traces, encouraging the viewer to also perceive what is not pictured, what is not photographed but is nonetheless present in the image through its stark absence. The physical absence mysteriously summoned by the photograph is what makes history palpable. It is a reminder that the land has a story to tell, even in the absence of a figure to offer its testimony.
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Works Cited:
“Hale County, This Morning, This Evening is not a traditional documentary in the sense of a linear structure, voiceover, or clear narrative arc […]” Producer Joslyn Barnes notes on the film for Filmmaker Magazine: “From the beginning, when we talked about the film, we wanted to avoid a narrative arc. And especially, we wanted to offer an alternative to the struggle narrative,” which places upon its protagonists the burden of success or failure as the conclusive goal a film is working toward. “We just wanted to take that pressure off the film,” Barnes continues, “so that we could foreground the environment and people in relationship to their own community.” See: Genevieve Jacobson, “A Cut in Time: RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes and Maya Krinsky Break Down a Scene from Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” (accessed January 8, 2024) https://filmmakermagazine.com/105957-a-cut-in-time/.
“I think it’s especially true that, in the context of filming African-American communities, no one looks long enough for new meaning to emerge […]” See: Max Fraser and RaMell Ross, Dissent (New York), vol. 66, no. 4, 2019, 33.
“Hale County This Morning, This Evening, can be considered an experimental documentary insofar as the film questions the limits and potentials of what documentary images can be and what the genre can do.” This perspective is echoed in Ross’s remarks on Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Series for the Criterion Collection. The use of slow-motion and time-lapse photography in the series, “quite literally alters one’s relationship to understanding what it is to see and what it is to know.” RaMell Ross, “How The Qatsi Trilogy Gave RaMell Ross a New Way of Seeing” (accessed January 8, 2024) https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6197-how-the-qatsi-trilogy-gave-ramell-ross-a-new-way-of-seeing#:~:text=The%20Qatsi%20Trilogy’s%20frequent%20use,to%20know%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20observes.
“The south is the [center] of the black experience […]” Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Harvard Film Archive, (accessed January 8, 2024) https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/solomon-fellow-ramell-ross
In these instances, photography provided, in Ross’s words, the “material proof of the racial lie.” Full citation: “The African-American community’s image (while acknowledging the challenge of summing up such a wiggly thing) is a construction. An unavoidable one at this point. Racist and unknowing others in the past created and employed images to prove their beliefs of our inferiority, positioning us visually to confirm their fantasies of our hypersexuality. In many ways, photography and film have always been the technology of racism. They offered material proof of the racial lie.”
“Is there a mode of representation that allows for infinite possibility?” See: Max Fraser and RaMell Ross, Dissent (New York), vol. 66, no. 4, 2019, 33.
“These changes in presence describe that which is unthought.” In Williams’s frame, these “structures of feeling” pertain to “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought; but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelated continuity.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Duke University Press, 1977), 133.
“I don’t believe I would have made this film — perhaps I would not have made a film at all — if not for the aleatory elements. I went by chance, tagging along […].” See: Max Fraser and RaMell Ross. Dissent (New York), vol. 66, no. 4, 2019, 32
For Ross, documentary is another word for contradiction. It can be understood as a search of a special kind — what Ross calls “a truthful way of looking.” See: “You use the documentary genre because it’s a space where people are predisposed to truth, which is a great, great entryway into an idea,” Ross remarked on his work. “The premise of truth puts viewers in the frame of mind to receive larger truths.” RaMell Ross quoted in Rebecca Bengal, “And the Clock Waits So Patiently,” in But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World, (London: MACK, 2021): 94
A sum of experience that can only contribute to what Ross calls the “epic banal.” See: RaMell Ross, “Renew the Encounter,” in Film Quarterly 1 March 2019; 72 (3): 19.