the The Newsletter of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture • Winter 2014
The University of Mississippi
The Future of Documentary Work Documentary work is an integral part of the Center and takes many forms, including oral histories, films, and photographic presentations. Spending time in the field doing documentary study brings the Center’s interdisciplinary coursework to life for many students. David Wharton, assistant professor of Southern Studies and director of Documentary Studies, leads the documentary work being done at the Center. His documentary photography classes always have an overriding theme, and at the end of each semester students make a book with their own photographs, give an online presentation combining photographs and text, and curate a collection of 70 pictures to be exhibited the following semester in the Gammill Gallery. Wharton’s fieldwork class provides students with the tools for going out into the South and discovering things. “It’s very important for students to get experience by being out in the field and talking to people, listening to people, observing people, and coming back to tell an audience something about their experience,” he says. “In many cases that involves bringing something back, whether it’s an interview, a photograph, or, for Andy Harper’s classes, a film.” While his fieldwork classes focus more on process than product, Wharton wants his students to realize it’s important to pay attention to the world around them. “Studying the South is more than just reading about it. The experience of being in the field is invaluable,” he says. Wharton’s most recent book of photographs, Small Town South was published in 2012, with The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade pub-
lished in 2000. In 2013 he was honored as Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award winner for photography. He is almost finished with a book-length project titled The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the American South, which examines the visual impact of traditional spirituality through landscape photography. The photographs also include cemeteries with religious signage and people engaging in various forms of worship in rural or small town settings throughout the South, including Texas, West Virginia, and Florida. Wharton says he is proud of the documentary work the Center does, and he is pleased with the group of smart, interesting Southern Studies graduate students that come through each year. “I think the Center has developed a little bit of a reputation as a place where you can do documentary work and have the support of a lot of different types of faculty doing different types of documentary,” he says. Teaching students to tell the stories of the South through film is the role of Andy Harper, the director of the Southern Documentary Project, formerly known as Media and Documentary Projects. The name change came about to better reflect the unit’s work since becoming a part of the Center. Harper took over a broadcast unit in 2004 with the direction to “make it academic.” To him, that meant being part of Southern Studies, a mission accomplished in 2012. “The genesis of this, way back when, was about turning the broadcast into a unit that told stories that leveraged the strengths that we have at this university,” says Harper, an instructional continued on page 30