_I turn to art when I feel lost or confused by the news. As counterintuitive as it may seem, it helps to engage with art to get a better grip on how things feel—politically, emotionally—rather than what they mean. To stand in front of a painting, or listen to a song, or sit with a book is to read by relating, to seek experiential rapport rather than the facts of a rigorous report. It’s to luxuriate in the leisure of not knowing yet, rather than to stay ever abreast of what’s happening right now, at this very moment, as notifications will do for you. Recently, I looked to the photographer RaMell Ross, whose oeuvre lives gratefully outside of news pegs and timestamps. His images seal slowly settling impressions. They are mysterious and fetching; you want to draw closer in rather than check out. His photos exist somewhere on the aesthetic spectrum next to the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the lyrical virtuosity of Roy DeCarava, who told the literary journal Callaloo in 1990, “I’m not a documentarian, I never have been. I think of myself as poetic, a maker of visions, dreams, and a few nightmares.” 

During an interview about his artist’s book Spell Time, Practice, American, Body (MACK, 2023), Ross explained to AnOther Magazine the way the history of Southern photography informs his practice: “As an artist, the photographic history revealed the American South as an open-air library, a reminder of the jester of time, encouraging us to believe that history isn’t also the future, the longest theatrical performance ever produced.” Ross’s comment puts words to a sensation that’s hard to name. That quote is an invitation to look askance at too-simple national narratives. The “jester of time” is a clarifying expression: It helps to underline the notion that cosmic humor is always in play. In Ross’s work, the American story is closer to a jokebook. That, or some other form that requires punchlines, or a note of surprise.

_Behold the silver pick-up truck: a site and stage and sculptural object. It’s parked on a lawn in front of a single-level home, which is a structure of blue, white, and gray vinyl and steel, a plane of sharp angles and soft hues. The slogan on the license plate reads SWEET HOME ALABAMA, and the scene in the photograph recalls the too-quaint landscape detailed in the chorus of that old Lynyrd Skynyrd song of the same name. At the left edge of the frame, there’s a group of trees, and the blue sky, stippled with the same white as the house, seems caught between two moods. This uncertainty extends to the picture’s color palate, all greys and weather-beaten metal on the cusp of transformation: the house’s siding; the truck’s slate chassis, the clay-colored rust of its undercarriage, and its oxidized tire hub. The aluminum Pepsi can on the lawn is an exception, a blue pop of color. Vertical lines overwhelm the composition, from the panels on the trailer to the vinyl siding, jutting out from the house like buck teeth or badly constructed picket fences, aesthetic imperfections in people or objects that demonstrate where the idyllic Dream diverges from reality. All this verticality contrasts with the protagonists of the picture, who are laid out, perhaps even stretched out. Two pairs of legs extend from the vehicle: one pair in dark denim, splayed over the lip of the truck bed; the other sticks out from beneath the Ford’s gas tank, just under a patch of rusted metal, skinny legs in black shorts and white Nike ankle socks, the bottoms slightly brown. The person is face down in the dirt, the opposite way of a mechanic. There’s something unsettling about the fact that neither guy’s face is visible; the boys, or men, are faceless, and therefore mostly emotionless, and, together with their physical inertia, it’s not difficult to imagine them dead. 

The photograph’s title, Brothers Z, could underline an aggressively vernacular way of spelling plural words, as in “brotherz,” or suggest the first letter of the family’s surname. Or, it may capture two sleeping brothers getting their Zzzs (one napping in the truck bed, the other resting on his stomach). Another meaning reveals itself: the title could refer to the fact that the arrangement of the limbs, zigging this way and that, are arrayed in the faintly perceptible shape of a “Z.” On the right edge of the photo, so out of the way you could easily miss it, a bush reveals a couple of surprises: the heads of two flowers, probably roses, maybe carnations. The blossoms present a twist on phrases of dogged determination in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Tupac Shakur’s The Rose That Grew from Concrete—except the blooms are a reprieve. They’re signs of life among all this gray and lethargy, this relentless ambivalence. If you’re the kind of person to read a photo all in one gaze, holding all elements in your head at once, finding those flowers is kind of an optimist’s Where’s Waldo. If you read the photo like English readers follow a sentence, from left to right, they’re the last thing you see. If the picture holds a narrative, those flowers are arrayed near the conclusion, and amid all this ambiguity, they scan as something like a happy ending.

_In RaMell Ross’s photographs, various elements of writing—from the building blocks of language to the specificity of literary genres—are encoded. In Ross’s hands, the one thousand words every photograph is meant to be worth are multiplied and compounded into an anthology of literary expressions. In addition to the possible reference to the alphabet in “Brothers Z,” in many of the works featured in Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross, exhibited by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art from October 2021 to March 2022, there are all kinds of linguistic allusions. A photograph of a stuffed bodysuit affixed to a stand in an empty corner of a room is called Doing Language (working title). Of course, words represent ineffable feelings and ideas, much in the same way this puffy mannequin form stands in for the corporeal. Or does Ross mean that words ward off more visceral meaning, as in terms used in scare quotes—as in the function of a scarecrow, which, by the way, very closely resembles this figure? A photo of an empty ravine with red-clay walls and lush green treetops in the background, titled Typeface, calls to mind a kind of indelible earthen font made of impressions left by rocks, while leaving open the possibility (and the responsibility) of reading the land with the kind of attention one would apply to a text. In the artworks and attendant catalogue, there are also nods to the dictionary, slang, and Shel Silverstein’s children’s books.

Much has been said of Ross’s propensity for poetry. To use a word the photographer employs in a series of sculptural pieces called A Splinter in the Thigh, he makes use of “propinquity,” the relation or kinship between images. His is poetry writ photographically—the clash and crush and colors of experience, coalescing frame by frame. One of my favorite sequences in Ross’s oeuvre is a moment from his Academy Award-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. The edit comes early in the nonlinear film, during a quasi-expositional sequence. We see Quincy Bryant, a young father, cradling his infant son Kyrie. Immediately after, the film cuts to a little boy holding a miniature aquarium in the crook of his elbow, a goldfish coursing inside. The cut is a line break, and connects two images that render acts of care. To my mind, the through line in the sequence is an overwhelming emphasis on nurturing, but the juxtaposition also creates a slightly ominous association which comes to bear later in the film—think of the life expectancy of goldfish. In his 2019 photograph Haiku, three men stand on an empty stretch of road, arranged in a semi-circle, each pointing a finger at the man next to him. This composition subverts the so-called Mexican standoff, which traditionally sees drawn guns, not fingers. One supposes each man corresponds with the haiku’s three lines, but whatever the gesture of accusation, or support, or play, in the hand symbol, goes unsaid. Whatever behavioral counterpart to the seventeen syllables in the poetic form also go unpronounced. 

Ross’s work also contains threads of nonfiction, most notably Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee, which is perhaps the most famous and most influential work about Hale County. While Evans and Agee documented the white tenant farmers in the area with literary sophistication and elegiac aplomb (in the book, there are so many sensitively rendered descriptions of light changing), in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross turns his gaze to another group, focusing on the care and caprice of the county’s black community, which he lived within for almost ten years, beginning in 2009. And yet, as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ross’s photographs “are not illustrative,” to quote that book’s preface. He punctuates moments of sweat and sensation with intricacy and subtle imagery: lightning strikes, shadow-play on gymnasium walls, young girls flabbergasted by fireworks, longing looks between an expecting couple. In his still pictures, a toppled church steeple resembles a discarded Ku Klux Klan hood (Sleepy Church) and a cross illuminated by tiny golden light bulbs, perhaps a congregation’s holiday decoration, calls to mind wooden crucifixes emblazoned with fire (Told on the Mountain). In Speaker, a lonesome lectern arranged in twilight or dawn on a seemingly residential street, conjures speeches made by the Mississippi Delta’s Fannie Lou Hamer, or members of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (the precursor to the Black Panther Party), which was founded eighty-eight miles southeast from Hale County. This photo also brings to mind the archival TV montages of marches in Selma and Birmingham, and how those visual collages distilled the heady mix of galvanizing fury, restraint, confidence, bewilderment, assassination, and wild-eyed survival that marked the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Speaker might capture the emotional reality of the period when integration became legalized (if not entirely actualized), and thus occasioned loneliness in some formerly all-black spaces, or what it felt like to see stages abandoned hastily, in the case of rapid gunfire, or slowly, in the case of political co-optation.

And yet, when I think of those shocking flowers in Brothers Z, and the surprises throughout Ross’s oeuvre, I’m reminded of another literary form: the Southern Gothic short story. There’s tremendous range within this tradition, as seen in work by writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, whose conjure tales tend to revel in irony; or Kate Chopin, whose yarns of “local color” including most famously “Désirée’s Baby,” sometimes turn on twist endings; or Pauline Hopkins, whose romance novels Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, and Contending Forces have shocking, coiling plots; or Zora Neale Hurston, whose works of folklore and short fiction, like “Sweat,” often involve reversal at their conclusions; or Flannery O’Connor, whose acerbic narratives, like “Good Country People” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” use foreshadowing and comedy to complicate moral arcs, to upend notions of conventional “goodness.” It’s not that Ross’s photographs and sculptures are plot-driven in the same way a short story is, it’s that they have an understated narrative quality. All images have context and history, but in Ross’s work, I can glimpse a chain of events, even if that impression is only teleological, or not entirely intended. Sometimes this movement is implied, as in the fallen church steeple, or in the unfinished construction of Model Home. Other times, as in Man, which sees a little kid wedging his body between a wheel hub and tire, the suggestion of circuitous movement is more obvious. In an interview with the filmmaker Garrett Bradley, Ross describes his interest in “singular complexity” and “the epic banal,” the latter of which he defines as “an epic moment in something that’s incredibly simple.” His photos are works of flash fiction, told in the click of a camera lens. 

And like classic Southern grotesques, these images require an oblique way of looking at things. One scene from Hale County is intercut with footage from Lime Kiln Field Day (1913), a film rediscovered more than one hundred years after it was shot, and which is considered to be the oldest surviving feature film with a black cast. The film stars the actor Bert Williams, in characteristic blackface, as Bert, a scheming ne’er-do-well hoping to nab the attentions of a woman. Back in Hale County, Ross’s camera passes down a main drag and turns up a winding pathway, all the way to the steps of a patrician, white-pillared mansion situated on a former plantation. We cut to the Bert character hiding in a wooded area, staring in a foreboding manner. The edit ratchets the tension. In Hale County, we see smoke. Bert holds onto the branches. And then we see Ross talking with a black man burning tires. The smoke billows through a clearing in the trees. The scene feels portentous, and then … there’s relief. The man burning rubber mentions that his grandson may have received a full scholarship to study photography. The men discuss the importance of black photographers. At the end of the sequence, Bert smiles and leaves the safety of the brush, threat apparently averted.

_This interest in revisiting or revising old narratives is a feature of Ross’s other works. Consider the installation “Return to Origin,” inspired by Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved man who mailed himself from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849. His path was a movement from bondage to manumission, a journey literally “up from slavery,” to use Booker T. Washington’s famous phrase. In his piece, Ross goes the other way. He details this change of orientation in an explainer text found in the Ogden exhibition’s catalog: “On October 11, 2021, I was freight shipped from North to South in a 4 x 4 x 8 foot box on an open air, goose-neck trailer. The contracted driver was not aware of the crate’s content. The fifty-nine hour trip from Rhode Island to Hale County, Alabama was recorded in full.” Ross’s backward trajectory is not unlike the reversal in a short story. There’s the driver’s surprise upon arrival, of course. But there are also other eyebrow-raising impressions that arise from this act of rerouting the journey and replotting the story. 

What does it mean for Ross to have been delivered from New England, the site of the first European settlers’ arrival in what would become this country, to Alabama? Is there extra resonance in the fact that, for a time in the eighteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island was the largest slave trading port in North America? Brown went North as an act of self-emancipation; Ross’s trip leads one to wonder what freedoms lie in the South. Or what de facto horrors awaited Brown in the North. This trajectory makes me think of the trip a character takes in Dogville, Lars Von Trier’s film about the fictional Rocky Mountain town of the same name. Hoping to escape a terrifying experience, Grace Mulligan (Nicole Kidman) hitches a ride with someone she thinks is an ally. She hides in the bed of a truck, and we see the car move. The audience, like Grace, thinks, Whew! We believe, just as she does, that she has escaped from her crisis. But along the way, the truck driver stops and rapes Grace. After the shock of that act wears off—if it ever does—the driver takes off again. The camera pans, and we come to the staggering realization that she’s ended up right where she started. He’s returned her to the site of the original violence. 

In an artist statement, Ross writes about how “the myth of blackness is entangled at the root of the South’s mythology—a mythology upheld in textbooks, institutions, media and film and literature. And photography is implicated.” Ross’s documentation of this trip—which involves remixing one of his childhood dictionaries and adding “black” before each word—is a way of rearticulating this implication, a way of showing how this myth can be narrativized anew. In one moment from Hale County, Ross focuses on a grandmother playfully and somewhat mercilessly chiding her toddler granddaughter for not knowing her name. The woman tells the girl she will need to take special education classes. A few frames later, a teacher leads a discussion about rural poverty. One of her students, a black man with a Northeastern accent, bemoans his problem with “the stereotype.” He says, “Because, as a city kid, every year I came down here, it was a joy to take off my shoes and run on the red clay. It was a joy to go hunting,” to wring a chicken’s neck, to pick pecans, to be soothed by his grandmother’s home remedies. “To me it’s the emphasis,” he says, “like what is really ‘poor and impoverished’?”

Ross’s emphasis is the multivalent blackness of Hale County, and “the space of ambiguity that is so human and so universal.” His characterization of the place recalls something the novelist William Faulkner said when asked if he was trying to “picture the South or Southern civilization as a whole” in some writing. He replied that he “wasn't writing sociology at all.” Instead, he “was just trying to write about people,” “just the human heart.” Another installation, Sure…But Us, Not You (Evidence), is the result of Ross uncovering a truly jaw-dropping antebellum mystery in Rhode Island, where he teaches and lives part-time. As the artist writes in the catalog, he discovered a safe in his home:

This safe was left in the garage of a multifamily house I purchased in Providence, Rhode Island in 2017. The combination dial and access lever to the safe were broken off and screw drivers were wedged near the top hinges from someone’s previous attempt to break in. I broke through the wall of the safe on July 29th, 2019. 

Inside the safe were “a Santa mask; a solder gun; a glove; 826 bullets (standard, law enforcement grade, and bird and quail shotgun shells, 22 caliber rifle bullets, and 22 caliber hollow point bullets); an embroidered patch of an American eagle on top of a confederate flag; a keepsake box containing two long rifle rounds, a quarter dated 1891, and a piece of propaganda with a confederate flag positioned over the words ‘The South Will rise again.’” The safe’s contents are appalling. The fact that this artist received this particular gift from the universe feels startling, and so does the idea that this man left Alabama only to find this reminder of Southern racist hostility, to discover the call was coming from inside the house. But there’s that Southern Gothic irony again. It’s confederate cannon balls blasting back into their hulls, an American narrative Big Bang in reverse—according to conventional wisdom, everything’s supposed to be better and safer up North. The first part of the installation’s title (“Sure … But Us, Not You”) reads like a half-finished quote about redistributing or shifting something—wealth? Blame? Accountability, as in an “it’s not you it’s me” kind of avoidant breakup? The language also intimates exclusion, but the line’s strange syntax resists easy interpretation. The phrase after the comma comes as a surprise, so the title has the cadence of an unexpected pronouncement. The pause of the punctuation is as resonant as one of the many ellipses used by Jean Toomer in Cane, that great Harlem Renaissance story cycle, another book about the literal and figurative mapping of North and South narrative—the novel’s action is organized by the movement of black Americans from Georgia to Washington, D.C., to Chicago, and back down South—and which is full of revelations and sentence-level astonishment.

In a journal article about the grotesque in Southern Gothic fiction, the scholar Mark Helmsing explains that in traditional European Gothic stories, endings arc in favor of moral propriety. “In Southern Gothic texts,” he writes, “an American twist is added: The morality and propriety that win out as traditional hallmarks of the Gothic never fully materialize. Or if they do, it comes with an ironic price, an unfortunate turn of fate that befalls ‘the good country people,’ to invoke the title of one of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic stories.” Helmsing continues:

In the Southern Gothic the world is in a ruinous state of violent decay, much like the world Southerners faced at the end of the U.S. Civil War and, again, during the Great Depression. Innocence, redemption, and salvation—these are hallmarks of progressing toward a reparative world we can inhabit with grace and goodwill. But what if this world is not for us? 

In that royal “us,” Helmsing cites “queer kids, bullied outsiders, battered wives, figures ostracized and oppressed by the normalizing forces of a local history and culture.” To that list, I might add or make explicit the inclusion of black residents of Hale County, except I imagine these people and their ancestors were less credulous about the things he names; violence, moral rot, and exclusion would be quite familiar to enslaved people and their descendants, who experienced and witnessed them firsthand. The fact of the North winning the Civil War was for some one of America’s wildest plot twists; as evidenced by their fascination with the confederate flag, many people seem to still be stunned. Is the title Sure … But Us, Not You (Evidence) something of a joke about how people think they have the South figured out? Black Southerners in particular? Is the rejoinder within the title—like the confederate treasures in the Providence garage—proof of how, in the still-stunning words of Andre 3000 at the close of OutKast’s acceptance speech at the 1995 Source Awards, “The South got something to say”? 

I think Ross, who once wrote that he daydreams of a “postmodern South,” is working in the way of someone like Toni Morrison, who transformed an old Uncle Remus tale into Tar Baby, her inventive 1981 novel about love and the constrictions of storytelling conventions. Ross’s use of wit and allusion is also reminiscent of the work of the American painter Kara Walker, who spent some of her formative years in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and whose silhouettes and sculptures depict the dark humor within certain visual and textural traditions. As in the practices of multidisciplinary artists like Louisville’s Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, whose Kentifrica project reimagines regionality, or Columbia, South Carolina’s Jacolby Satterwhite, whose Reifying Desire videos complicate questions of inheritance and interrogate the after-effects of media consumption, Ross spins the Southern Gothic story in his own image. In his pictures, the chronology is funny, the “jester of time” making callbacks that echo indefinitely. In his hands, Hale County is no Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, Faulkner’s “apocryphal county,” but it’s just as tenderly imagined. Ross emphasizes surprise, and prefers a dense, intricate narrative thicket, not unlike the entwinement of so many Hale County trees.

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