Mystery, myth, and beauty shine through RaMell Ross’ solo exhibition, “Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross,” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Photographs by RaMell Ross | Words by Richard McCabe
Both timely and timeless, the depth and breadth of RaMell Ross’ art illuminates the lushness of the rural Alabama landscape while sublimely revealing the humanity of the American South and beyond.
“Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross” features the complete set of large-scale photographs from the “South County, AL (a Hale County)” series. The exhibition includes several sculptural and immersive site-specific video installation works that speak to Ross’ personal history and expand his practice beyond photography and filmmaking.
While I was researching artists to include in the Ogden Museum’s New Southern Photography exhibition in 2018, Alan Rothschild, founder of the Do Good Fund public photography collection, introduced me to Ross’ work. New Southern Photography was the largest photography exhibition ever organized by the Ogden. The show featured 25 photographers and filmmakers, and more than 230 photographs and two video/film works. In 2019, I approached Ross about having a solo exhibition of his art at the Ogden. This exhibition has been three years in the planning.
Here, 2012
Hale County has an almost mythical place in the pantheon of Southern literature and art. The county was the location for James Agee’s seminal 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which featured Walker Evans’ iconic photographs of three white tenant farming families and the vernacular architecture of the county. From the 1960s to 2000s, William Christenberry — born in nearby Tuscaloosa, Alabama — followed in the tradition of Evans by immortalizing Hale County’s old buildings and rural landscape in his drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures, producing one of the most important bodies of work on a singular place in the history of American art.
“To be Black is the greatest fiction of my life. Yet I’m still bound to its myth. I can’t help but think about the myth’s childhood and its backyard of the South. How the myth of Blackness aged into fact and grew into laws. How it evolved from there to become tacit, and join the secret order of things. How it became the dark matter of the American imagination.”
Ross is the latest in a trajectory of artists to tackle Hale County as both subject and muse. Unlike Christenberry — whose art focused on familial ties to the land and capturing time’s patina on the vanishing vernacular architecture of the region –— Ross’ art focuses on the county's Black community. Ross’ photographs and films situate the storied county within a 21st-century context. Ideas of place, time, race, and identity — themes central to Southern art — are at the forefront of Ross’ contemporary visualization of Hale County.
Dakesha and Marquise, 2012
As a basketball player at Georgetown University, Ross’ dreams of playing in the NBA were dashed by a career-ending injury. During his physical rehabilitation, Ross followed his lifelong interest in art by enrolling in a traditional black-and-white darkroom photography class and a survey course on the history of photography. He learned camera operation and darkroom printing and was introduced to the work of Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Lee Friedlander. In 2009, Ross got a job coaching basketball and teaching photography to at-risk youth through Youth Build, a national program that took him to Greensboro, Alabama. Upon arrival he was immediately struck by the synergy of the place. He soon discovered the work of Christenberry and Evans and began recognizing the locales of their many iconic photographs throughout Hale County. With fresh eyes and perspective, Ross started making photographs with a large-format film camera — the same tool used by his artistic predecessors.
Look what Miles Davis did with the trumpet … You give it to him and he's emoting this [whole other] world. He's using essentially the master's tools. ... I have to use the same tools that Evans and Christenberry used.… [From] the same laborious process that they presented these rigid formal things, you can get something whimsical and something very human and also abstract.
Ida Mae, 2012
By 2012, Ross was finding his voice through the lens of a camera. The breakthrough moment came when he realized that the traditional documentary storytelling construct of capturing the real world “as it is,” through narrative sequencing based in linear time, was incapable of accurately portraying Hale County’s Black community. At the same time, Ross recognized the problematic power dynamic the camera presented in exacerbating the “otherness” inherent in traditional documentary-art structure. Over those years, the young people that Ross got to know through his work became his creative collaborators. Through the implementation of an oblique strategy forged in a spirit of collaboration with the community, Ross began constructing photographs based in reality.
Caspera, 2019
Typeface, 2021
At his core, Ross is a storyteller with a camera, and his work occupies a unique space between documentary, social-documentary, post-documentary, conceptual, and experimental art. Ross’ art is a slow reveal, a quiet whisper. Ross brilliantly constructs a narrative predicated upon the loose association of visual signifiers. The structure of his art unfolds organically through imagery based on stream-of-consciousness — producing an aesthetic more akin to cinema vérité as opposed to the logical linear sequencing found throughout the genres of documentary photography and film. Like poetry, Ross’ open-ended, nonlinear approach to the documentary tradition combines with the metaphorical imagery he creates to enable the viewer multiple points of entry into his art.
“Liberated documentation, as I term it, it’s that Western ethics and values of documenting and the document are unsuited to deal with the complexity of Blackness. I want to make work that unitedly honors its participants, resists their easy consumption and judgment, and quietly asks our imagination and intellect to question the known and easy constructions of identity and place.”
Open, 2013
When his Academy Award-nominated film, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” was first conceived, Ross was hoping to make a traditional documentary film in the vein of Steve James’ 1994 “Hoop Dreams.” Early on, Ross realized that real-time sequencing was not going to suffice in telling the coming-of-age story of Daniel Collins, an aspiring basketball player at Selma University, and Quincy Bryant, a young father who works in a local catfish processing plant.
The discovery began after I moved to Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach basketball.
Photographing in my day-to-day, I began filming using time to figure out how we’ve come to be seen.
Ross’ manipulation of the real-time continuum is ironically reflected in the title of the film, which refers to a single day in the life of a particular place, even though the film takes place over the span of several years. Throughout the film, time speeds up and slows down through the use of time-lapse and slow-motion photography. The moon flies across the night sky. Car headlights appear and disappear, flashing like fireflies as they zip by at dawn along a lonely country road. Time contracts.
In another scene, the lens of a static camera forms a theatrical proscenium arch allowing the audience a glimpse into the drama of the Selma University basketball team’s chaotic pregame locker room. The scene starts out in real time — over several minutes the players jump about and horse around as Collins stands center-stage, deep in trancelike meditative thought. Then the scene begins to transition into slow motion as the players exit the locker room. The ambient musical score amplifies and blends with the shouts of the players’ voices, echoing, bouncing off the hollow locker room walls until it reaches a pulsating psychedelic crescendo of swirling sounds. Time expands.
The film, which Ross describes as “epic banal,” is a collage of beautifully photographed scenes that capture the extraordinary in the ordinary. Edits, fades, and cuts are based on association — as in a close-up shot of sweat droplets hitting the floor of a basketball court before fading into raindrops splashing in a puddle on a sidewalk. The open-ended, ambiguous nature of the film lends itself to subjective interpretation based on the imagination of the viewer.
Speaker, 2012
Sleepy Church, 2014
A photograph or film by Ross inspires dialogue. The intrinsic meaning of his work is not on the surface, but underneath. Ross’ art asks more questions than it answers, and in doing so fosters active engagement with the viewer to investigate and decode the plural messages. In “Giving Tree, 2012,” a teenage girl, Aisha Lockett (who goes by Shay) is slumped over the branch of a large oak tree. The title was taken from Shel Silverstein’s classic illustrated children’s book, The Giving Tree.
In the photograph, Shay’s contorted body seems to mimic the gestural posturing of characters in Silverstein’s illustrations. (Ross names Silverstein as a serious influence in his work; his mother read poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic aloud to him as a child.) The constructed nature and formal qualities of “Giving Tree” also seem to place the photograph in conversation with Charles Ray’s iconic 1973 conceptual photograph, “Plank Piece I and II,” an auto-portrait of Ray suspended off the ground and pinned to a wall by a wooden board.
Giving Tree, 2012
The Gotten Tree, 2019
Yet another interpretation of Ross’ photograph is as a visualization of the lyrics from Billie Holiday’s song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.” Could this seemingly sweet and innocent photograph of playful childhood bliss actually be a paradoxical commentary on the horrific lynching postcards that were made during the Jim Crow era?
Most of my ideas are aesthetic. They're visual first. I've never made an image where I'm like, this is going to mean this. I'm always like, oh, this is a cool gesture. I like the way that this physical space looks. And I wonder what it's like for a human body to interact with this kind of weird space. And then afterwards I'm like, “What does it mean?” or maybe more importantly, “What can it mean?”
Haiku, 2019
Shaquan, 2013
Through a highly original process of photography and filmmaking that allows the artist to, as Ross describes it, “participate, not capture; shoot from, not at, the community,” Ross has successfully navigated the problematic power dynamic of representing the “other” that has long haunted the documentarian. With “Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body,” Ross has written, with light, a new chapter in the story of Hale County, Alabama.
Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross. Opening October 23, 2021, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. On view through March 27, 2022.
Richard McCabe is a curator, photographer, and writer based in New Orleans. Since 2010, he has been the Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and has organized and curated over 35 exhibitions including: Seeing Beyond the Ordinary, The Mythology of Florida, The Rising, Eudora Welty: Photographs from the 1930s - 40s, The Colourful South, Self-Processing: Instant Photography and New Southern Photography. McCabe’s photographs have been included in gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the United States. McCabe’s thoughts and writings on photography have been published in the New York Times, Time, National Public Radio (NPR), Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Spot, The Bitter Southerner, and LENSCRATCH magazine.
Header Photo: Man, 2019
