“Rotan Switch takes its name from the community’s central landmark–the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. ” —Lisa McCord
The passing of time has a way of adding context and layers of meaning to any story, and photographer Lisa McCord‘s expansive and nuanced project and book Rotan Switch, published by Kehrer Verlag, reflects the dedication of over 40 years of observation and documentation of her rural southern family farm and community.
In 1978 at age 21, McCord began photographing her grandparents’ cotton farm located in the South of rural Arkansas, 50 miles north of Memphis, and along the Mississippi River. The comprehensive book includes analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes, all combining to give the viewer a unique window into a deeply personal exploration of the definitions home and community, race and industry. The photographs include images of herself, her family, the farmworkers, and caretakers to whom she grew close and shared her life, and the land itself.
In her essay for the book McCord considers how her images provide both a glimpse of life into this particular time and place, and also exist within the context of some of the aggregate cultural and social factors unique to the rural South.
She expands on this shifting awareness within herself as she grew further into adulthood and writes eloquently about the historical and personal complexities present in both the images themselves, but also in the act of being able to photograph and document in this way. By sharing her insight as accompaniments to the photographs, she evokes a deeper immersion by the viewer into the images and implications of the project as a whole. She notes,
“These photographs are complicated; they exist in the context of the socioeconomic structures of the rural South. Although the subjects are family to me, as a white photographer and the granddaughter of a landowner, my photographs of the Black community implicate my own role in reinforcing these power structures. In a community in which most people spend their time working or caring for children, my ability to observe and document in itself has been a position of privilege.”
Lisa McCord : Rotan Switch
Kehrer Verlag
Texts by Lisa McCord, Alexa Dilworth, Lonnie Graham, and Aline Smithson
Design by Caleb Cain Marcus, Luminosity Lab
Cloth hardcover with two tipped-in plates
204 pages, 25 color and 55 tritone photographs.
23 x 29.9 cm
ISBN 978-3-96900-151-6
Price: $58 US
https://www.lisamccordphotography.com/rotan-switch
