All About Photo Presents ‘Rotan Switch’ by Lisa McCord
Solo Exhibition August 1–31, 2023
I began documenting life on my grandparents’ cotton farm in 1978, when I was twenty-one years old. I developed close relationships with the people who worked on the farm. They welcomed me into their homes; I’d hang out with them at the juke joints where they relaxed at the end of a hard week of work. We’d share fried chicken and black-eyed peas. We’d sing “Sweet Jesus, Carry Me Home” at St. John Missionary Baptist Church.
I have lived in many places, but my idea of home remains firmly rooted in the Arkansas land and people. After forty years, I have come to realize that all the photographs I made at Rotan are explorations of home. I’ve also come to realize that the place I call home is not perfect. Rotan Switch takes its name from the community’s central landmark — the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales 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.
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.
The images are coupled with my own memories as well as reflections by the people in the photographs. These images are a record of my story of Rotan and the Arkansas Delta, a story that is specific to me and my family’s role in a place where inequities exist to this day. I have done my best to acknowledge this complicated history.
Discover the full project here
