New Southern Photography Book--Joe York on roadside religion

The University Press of Mississippi has published a new photography book, With Signs Following a collection of photographs by Joe York, who is a filmmaker-photographer here in Oxford, MS. He's shown the photos here and at Auburn and is presently showing some of them at the Southside Gallery in Oxford; they are black and white photographs of roadside religion (Joe says in the text that he went driving across the south looking for biscuits and instead found God). They are fascinating and creepy among other things. The intro to the book is by Charles Reagan Wilson, until recently director of Southern Studies at Ole Miss.

Joe is most known for his food-oriented documentaries, particularly "Whole Hog," and is just completing a really great and moving short documentary about Willie Mae's Scotch house, a restaurant in Treme in New Orleans, and the impact of Katrina. Joe is also a friend of mine.

Sounds intriquing. I'm always looking for images that can stack up to William Eggleston and William Christenberry.

That's a pretty high standard, almost asking that current southern fiction stack up against Faulkner. OTOH, Joe's pictures are good. You can see the book cover and some of the images here.

The images in the Clarion Ledger photo gallery look to be scans from the book, and therefore somewhat fuzzy...............

High standards, indeed. At the risk of delving into art theory my personal interest in photography has as much to do with what's in front of the camera as with who's behind it. A photographer with luck, good judgment, and passing skill can do the job. Arguably more than that is needed to produce a fictional work of equivalent value. The contents of the novelist's frame have to be re-invented from scratch.

thf4: I got the impression, from those pics, that the photographer was going for a kind of grainy "old-looking" style with the Photos. It kindof works with the subject matter, but I guess I'll have to hunt down the book itself to see for sure.

I've seen both the prints and the book itself and they don't have the grainy look of the online gallery.

I am interested in the book's focus and may order it.

I am glad you told us about this book. I received it yesterday from Amazon. The photographs are excellent.