The South in Color: A Visual Journal (Signed)

Ferris, William (Signed)

ISBN 10: 1469629682 / ISBN 13: 9781469629681

Published by University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2016

About this Item

Hardcover with black cloth over boards, silver lettering along spine. Black DJ with colorful photographs on covers, black and yellow text across covers and along spine. Corners, crown and foot of spine lightly bumped. Covers otherwise pristine and still glossy. No date on title page. Copyright page dated only 2016. xviii + 120 pages. Includes foreword by Tom Rankin, full-page, colorful photographs on most pages. Front free endpaper inscribed "For Myriam Springull -- With very best wishes-- Bill Ferris, Chapel Hill, March 19, 2018" in dark pen. Pages clean and bright, glossy. Binding neat and tight. Please email us with questions or to request photos.

Seller Inventory # 24-1248

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The South in Color: A Visual Journal (Signed)
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469629682
• ISBN 13: 9781469629681
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Since the moment William Ferris’s parents gave their twelve-year-old son a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, Ferris passionately began to photograph his world. He has never stopped. The sixties and seventies were a particularly significant period for Ferris as he became a pathbreaking documentarian of the American South. This beautiful, provocative collection of 100 of Ferris’s photographs of the South, taken during this formative period, capture the power of his color photography. Color film, as Ferris points out in the book’s introduction, was not commonly used by documentarians during the latter half of the twentieth century, but Ferris found color to work in significant ways in the photographic journals he created of his world in all its permutations and surprises.

The volume opens with images of his family’s farm and its workers — family and hired — southeast of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The images are at once lyrical and troubling. As Ferris continued to photograph people and their homes, churches, and blues clubs, their handmade signs and folk art, and the roads that wound through the region, divisive racial landscapes become part of the record. A foreword by Tom Rankin, professor of visual studies and former director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, provides rich insight into Ferris’s work.

About the Author

William Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Ferris’s two previous books, Give My Poor Heart Ease and The Storied South, The South in Color completes an informal trilogy of Ferris’s documentation of the South’s tumultuous twentieth century.