9/23/2023 0 Comments Mississippi columbus![]() ![]() Pruitt moved to Columbus-then home to about 10,000 people, half of whom were Black-around 1917.Īs a white man, Pruitt enjoyed privileges denied to Black photographers. ![]() Call Russ”), complete with its segregated restrooms. Photos Pruitt captured lined the walls of Hudson’s family home, showcasing his grandparents’ dry cleaning store (slogan: “When clothes are dirty, dial Six-Thirty”) and his father’s Main Street service station (“Don’t cuss. He moved to Columbus-then home to about 10,000 people, half of whom were Black-around 1917 and served as the town’s unofficial photographer for the rest of his life. Pruitt was born on a farm in south central Mississippi in 1891. We always see images that present Black people as only one experience, so this book is important because it shows joy and resilience, the things that help people get up in the morning.” ![]() that we don’t talk about.” The author of more than a dozen books on photography and Black bodies, she adds, “ shows the joy of Black life, even within this context of fear and death. “Another exhibit could be done on portraits that are beautiful,” says Hudson, “but this provides a context that is rich and layered.”Īrtist, writer and curator Deborah Willis describes Pruitt as “a photographer who made images of the everyday beauty but also the everyday brutality. As the journalist explains, the selected photos show Pruitt’s range, “including the sublime, sacred, tragic, shocking, horrific and uplifting.” The accompanying exhibition, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, debuted in Columbus earlier this month. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South, the book-published jointly by the University of North Carolina Press and Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies-features more than 190 images carefully curated by Hudson. Pruitt (far right), his son Lambuth (far left) and his brother Jim (center), circa 1925Ĭourtesy of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Librariesįifty-five years after Pruitt’s death in 1967, his long-overlooked photos are the subject of both a new book and a traveling exhibition. “So we started on a journey to uncover what that all meant to us then and what it may mean to people in the future.” “We found beautiful portraits of people, both Black and white, and we sensed that this was a photobiography of our town,” says Hudson, a white former journalist who has spent much of the past 30 years preserving and studying Pruitt’s oeuvre. Interspersed with these haunting images were snapshots of everyday life: weddings and funerals, Sunday suppers and baptisms, workers and families. Emanating an eye-watering vinegar and acid stench, the negatives exposed the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South, from a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) parade to Black men hanging from gallows and tree limbs. Inside the building were wooden and pasteboard boxes filled with roughly 88,000 negatives taken by Pruitt between 19. The cavernous, loft-like studio belonged to photographer Calvin Shanks, who’d purchased it from his former boss and later business partner, a white man named O.N. Berkley Hudson was a lanky 20-something in the mid-1970s when two boyhood friends led him up a set of creaky wooden stairs in their hometown of Columbus, Mississippi. ![]()
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