Review: “Southern Rites” delivers powerful story of Black and White proms

“Can a new generation liberate itself from a traumatic past to create a different future?” This is the potent question posed by Maya Benton, curator of photographer Gillian Laub’s deeply impactful Southern Rites exhibit at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center through January 8.

The power of the photographic image to effect change, or at least to act as its catalyst, is well established and Laub’s work sits firmly in that genre. By its nature, social documentary photography bears witness with the camera as tool for social change.

Take the 1930s and ’40s Farm Security Administration photographers, namely Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, whose photographs revealed the hardships — and the dignity — of Depression-era rural life, and those of the civil rights era, such as Danny Lyon, Ernest Withers and Charles Moore, whose early images helped inspire a movement. Change can be sparked by one person, but true change is enacted by garnering the attention and involvement of others.

With word and image, Laub’s exhibit delivers just such a story — one with the ballast of personal experience to dig deep into Benton’s question. The truths to be found in Southern Rites reveal that the answer may be both yes and no.

This traveling exhibition, sponsored by the International Center of Photography, is a comprehensive show of almost four dozen mostly documentary-style photographs of young people in their prom finery whose attendant first-person text is essential to the impact of the exhibition. The prom’s importance is manifest in the care and extravagance these young people have invested in their outfits.

In Amber and Reggie, Mount Vernon, Georgia, 2011, the two students stand solemnly before an old wooden building weathered to a silver gray, she in a seafoam green confection of a dress and Reggie with his matching tie and studied hair. The caption will break your heart.

Girls, both Black and White, look older than their years. Care has been given to every detail — nails, coiffure, the best dresses. Their dates are dressed to complement them. Most of them look serious, as if they want so badly to be more than they are. There is little room for frivolity. They have saved all year for this night.

An additional two dozen items in vitrines contribute to the vital narrative of Laub’s 20-year project. Allow time to delve into it all. This exhibition will reverberate commensurate with, and long after, the time you spend here.

Story is inextricable from Laub’s attention-commanding color photographs. Commissioned by Spin magazine in 2002, the photographer and activist first visited Mount Vernon, a small town in southeast Georgia’s Montgomery County, to document the town’s segregated homecoming rituals. The resulting story, published in May 2003, “Separate but Equal?”, has its origins in the direct action taken by one person who spoke out, Anna Rich. A high school junior who had recently moved to town, Rich wrote to Spin’s editor calling attention to the racism and practices of segregation in her newly adopted hometown where, as Amber at 16 had observed: “Prom is everything around here . . . ”

Everything, but apparently not the same thing. There was a Black prom and a White prom. Whites could go to both or either. Blacks could only go to “their own.” Mexican American students could go to either as well, but only because according to one of them, “the White kids didn’t want to add a Mexican column” to the existing (and required) Black and White voting options.

Wall text delivers a comprehensive history of the region, with a concise telling of the trajectory of post-Reconstruction racism to the present. Laub’s photographs and her subjects’ stories portray insiders’ views — in Black voices and White — of the ways racism was, and still is, very much alive. And how it is passed from generation to generation, mindfully or otherwise.

We see Harley, 16, getting ready for the White prom at the Cut-N-Up tanning and hair salon: The segregated proms are “just what we know and what our parents have done for so many years. It’s not about being racist.” In a second photograph, Harley is paired with her look-alike mother, Anita, who pronounces: “It’s fine having things the way it’s been done for however long. Leave it alone. We don’t want to change it.”

Angel, in her emerald green dress outside the Black prom, didn’t want to talk either, but for different reasons: She didn’t “want to jeopardize my future here.”

Keyke Burns, whom we meet in 2008, recounts her experience as a 7-year-old in 1997 who had the honor of presenting the crown to the Black homecoming queen: “They even make little kids be segregated, and they’re teaching kids at such a young age: You be a color . . . act your color. Know your place.”

In 2009, Laub’s photo essay was published in the New York Times Magazine and went viral, sparking national outrage and thrusting the small town into the spotlight. When she returned the following year, she wasn’t as welcomed — or as anonymous. Her tires were slashed and many who had talked with her earlier no longer felt free to do so for fear “their houses would be burned down.”

Change that at least looked like progress finally came in 2011. Two years after the inauguration of our country’s first Black president, the town held its first integrated prom. But when Laub returned, she was physically attacked and handcuffed by the Montgomery County sheriff, who took her film and camera. “There was no one to help,” wrote Laub. “The proms were a symptom of something much larger.”

Indeed, it is this “something much larger” that her photographs address (including the 2011 murder of Justin Patterson, subject of her short film Just a Black Boy and related images, both on view here).

But despite the ugly truths, Laub reveals, Southern Rites is not an active indictment of a region, or this one small town. There is a glimmer of hope in the aggregate of her images, especially in the strength and determination of these young people who seem far wiser than those who would institutionalize racism.

Angel was worried in 2009 to talk about the segregated proms, but in 2016 she was proud to say that she “helped make a change by using my voice . . . if my friends and I didn’t speak out, there’s a chance the proms would still be segregated.”

Southern Rites offers the unmediated truth about one place, and the incremental change Laub witnessed there and perhaps catalyzed. In so doing, the exhibit reflects a universal concern. It compels us to look until our looking becomes seeing, and that’s the way change happens. Truly seeing compels us not to look away.

These children stare at us as openly as they share their experiences. How can we look away, or if we do, what does that make us?  Southern Rites doesn’t answer that question, but it holds up a mirror. As one student said of Laub: “You put the mirror up and it cracked.”

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Donna Mintz is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. A current studio artist at Atlanta Contemporary, her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and MOCA GA. She writes for the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, BurnAway, and ArtsATL, where she is a regular contributor. She recently completed a book on the life of writer James Agee and holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South.