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Marina Cox, the photographer of an agonizing summer

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Marina Cox’s fascination with the South of the United States goes back to her first trip to the region, back in 1991. It was a journey of initiation across Louisiana and Mississippi, with their cotton fields, Spanish moss, the blues, Cajun fais do-do, plantation houses, and ramshackle cabins. She returned with a handful of black-and-white photos that helped build her reputation.

She went back there twenty and again twenty-five years later, once more immersing herself in a world that has proven to be as familiar as it is unchangeable and timeless. Deliberately turning her back on the so-called must-see attractions, and straying from the beaten path to wander along country roads and byways, the photographer privileges the mundane and the trivial, anything that is in touch with the local culture. She skips Graceland and Beale Street in Memphis, and isn’t interested in the steamboats sailing lazily down the river, or in the wrought iron balconies of the French Quarter in New Orleans… Instead, she seeks out lost cemeteries, empty streets, and dusty boutiques. And wherever she goes, she encounters crosses erected at the edges of forests and star-spangled banners made of all sorts of materials. Patriotism and religion are omnipresent, deceptively binding a society often unaware of its own divisions. The American dream is now but a dream… which no one, or nearly no one, believes in any more. The time has come to seize the day, and to make ends meet. And this is, in essence, the reality.

But there are also things everyone hopes to find or recover in this region rich in history, stories, and tragedies, charged with mystery and full of paradox.

Having grown up on Southern literature, music, and cinema, and on photography of the Deep South, Marina Cox can’t escape those more or less unconscious influences no more than she can forget what she knows even before seeing it and showing it. The South is a world that can’t be explored in innocence: it is not a terra incognita.

Marina Cox’s photographs can be thus read like pages from Faulkner or James Lee Burke, or listened to like the blues of Jessica Mae Hemphill or R. L. Burnside, or looked at like the images of Walker Evans or William Eggleston. Her pictures remind us that the truth is often in the details that, at first glance, may seem unimportant.

Marina Cox no doubt fully understands the various facets of the South, a region full of contradictions, suffering from injustice, and battered by the elements, but never resigned to its fate and always rising again, just as it is being pronounced dead. Even flaking and faded, the colors are still bright beneath the storm clouds that fail to raise an eyebrow; and when the sky clears, invisible hands seem to paint little clouds as if to give it some depth.

In Tutwiler, MS, a little girl walks along rail tracks where no trains travel anymore. At Red’s Juke Joint in Clarksdale MS, Robert Belfour’s guitar cords hang forever in the air. The South is decrepit and in decay, but its attraction is like that of a magnolia tree which is no less beautiful once it’s blossoms have faded.

Alain D’Hooghe

Alain D’Hooghe is an editor, writer, iconographer, and historian of photography. He lives and works in Belgium.

 

Marina Cox, Agonizing Summer
May 18 to July 8, 2017
box galerie
102 chaussée de Vleurgat
1050 Brussels
Belgium

http://www.boxgalerie.be/

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