Right away, it is obvious: even more than in the USA, we are in the South. The deep South. This is partly due to the dampness of the air, partly also to the smells, indefinable but heady.
Marina Cox has been spellbound by this region of the world for more than a quarter of a century, no doubt since she got married, on the porch of a patrician house in Franklin, Louisiana. A few meters from the bayou Teche.
In the Deep South, the daily and the myth are incessant back and forth, and Marina Cox has understood the very essence of the multiple aspects of this world crossed by contradictions, folding under the yoke of injustices or the fury of the elements but not never submitting to fatality and reborn every time we pretend to be moribund.
In some respects, the South is perhaps decrepit, deliquescent, but its beauty is reminiscent of that of magnolia, which, even when faded, loses none of its appeal.
The images that make up this book do not respond to any logic other than the photographer’s gaze.
They are the fruit of encounters – with people, places, lights, little things seemingly insignificant. The truth of things often lies in the details of which we do not perceive the importance at first glance.
The thread connecting these images is more of a wander than any pre-established route. Chance, desires, the taste of side roads have always been a guide.
Forgotten cemeteries, lost restaurants in the middle of nowhere, deserted juke-joints, abandoned motels (apparently only), huts from another age … These photographs read like pages of Carson McCullers or James Baldwin, listen as Blues by Jessie Mae Hemphill or Robert Belfour look like Walker Evans or Alec Soth.
When asked to describe her work, Marina defines it as “poetic documentary”. We could not say better.
Marina Cox : Agonizing Summer
Foreword by Larry Fink, notes by Alain D’Hooghe
Co-published by ARP2 Publishing and box gallery
104 pages – 26 x 24 cm – 73 photographs reproduced in quadrichromy
Hardcover with illustrated jacket
French / English texts
Current issue – 38 € (info: [email protected])
Edition of head, accompanied by a numbered and signed print, limited to 25 copies (choice between two images) – 200 € (information: [email protected])
Published May 1, 2019
