Photographer Grapples With The Complexities Of The American South In New Photo Book

What does it mean to confront your own childhood and identity in a place that has become so synonymous with a racist past? This is something award-winning documentary photographer Nancy Farese grapples with in her new stunning photography book, ‘I Still Speak Southern In My Head’, published by Workshop Arts.

Nancy creates collages that incorporate threads, beads, buttons and cloth with family archive images and recent photographs to create a complex visual memoir in which she reexamines her childhood growing up in the American South in the 1960’s. Some of the cultural tropes resonating with the Southern experience that she considers and questions include the culture of segregation, views on female-gendered roles, and the intersections between what we experience as children and what we learn about those experiences and memories of place, home, and family once we’ve grown. 

‘I Still Speak Southern In My Head’ originally stems from a traveling mixed media exhibition entitled ADD|MIX|FOLD that includes the hand-crafted photographs shown in this book. The title comes from a family pound cake recipe, and serves as a metaphor for how we blend and slice up stories and memories to make sense of ourselves during these extraordinary, frenetic, ephemeral times.

This internal and visual investigation is rooted in part in what Nancy feels many adults who were children of the south in the 1960s experience, calling it “the Southern Paradox—an experience of beauty alongside violence, defiance alongside shame—and we don’t know what to do with it.”

Her response was to consider this paradox deeply, returning to the home in rural Georgia where she grew up to photograph, writing and exploring family archival photographs. The project began during the Covid pandemic while navigating the political, social, and emotional turbulence of that time period. In her essay, she shares how she interacted with the images through symbolic and visual layering.

The images are compelling, at times distant, but also conjure up the notion of an historical cultural pain that still sits beneath the surface of life in America today. We had the opportunity to ask Nancy more about her book, discuss the idea that racism is not just a Southern problem but an American one, and what she hopes people who see her images will discuss and interrogate within their own lives and identities.

You mention that it was COVID-19 that prompted the beginnings of ‘I Still Speak Southern In my Head’. What was it in particular about this turbulent time that gave way to your latest project?

In 2020, early in the COVID years, to keep my hands busy on zoom I began sewing on an old black and white photo of my Gramma Richards, celebrating her 1952 winning of the Giant Cabbage Contest at the GA State Fair. Kamala Harris had just been nominated for Vice President, so I added text to the image from a New York Times headline, “Ambition has Always Been Ladylike”, to underscore the theme of women, ambition and satisfaction; Gramma Richards was obviously ambitious!

But in that frenetic and chaotic era, when images were flying across our screens and our lives so quickly, this work of stitching and collaging on top of photos became also about creating artifacts to document the extraordinary moment we were living in. The work that would evolve into the book began with the idea of complicating images to explore and explain a complicated world. 

The purpose of the work became about creating a visual archive of the times that would be both tangible and handcrafted — tactile in our increasingly ephemeral world. We no longer have photos, letters or newspapers to document how we’ve endured these extraordinary times.  In this project I am creating a response to the question of “what we will have to show the grandchildren?”.

Racism is a core topic or theme examined in your book. Why was it important for you to include this and talk about it? 

‘I still speak Southern in my Head’ is a catalog of images and text that lays out my project of understanding how I came to be. I grew up white and female in a conservative, small rural town in Georgia in the 1960s. I wanted to decode my Southern upbringing which remains so alive in my now, but socially and culturally, this landscape no longer exists. 

The structures of segregation were well embedded in the South of my childhood, but during the 60s they began to be challenged, chipped away, fought against. It was a decade of profound violence, and progress. The most significant civil rights legislation in American history happened then, alongside protest, resistance and a conceptual embrace of political justice. We are still in this fight and have to remember that history is not just a discreet series of events but is a continuously renegotiated set of ideas.

When I think back to that time I wonder why it took us so long to notice the contradictions between our higher ideals of justice and democracy which were the bedrock of our civic, church and school teachings, and the injustices of our everyday lives. As fellow Southern and photographer Sally Mann has said of growing up in the South, “why did we never ask the questions?” If we believe we are a nation of laws, we rely on a shared set of ideals, vigilance and governance to protect ourselves from gross injustice, though they are far from perfect. Once again, these ideals are being challenged. The work of democracy is constant.

You also mention that racism is not just an issue prevalent in the South, but across the whole United States. What do you hope your book will encourage all Americans to think about on the topic of racism? 

Sociologists talk about ‘the Americanization of the South’ initiated by the civil rights bills of the 1960s. Indeed, the South today is not the same place it was at all. Socially, we can now confront segregation as a moral disease, though that conversation continues still, not just in the South, but everywhere. Individually, as Southerners we are left to either wrestle with or ignore the weight of the history we inherited. As Southern identity merges into a nationalized identity we can ask ourselves at large where racism and sexism sit in American politics and culture.

I hope people take away two things from this book. First is the power of memory and story — how malleable and imperfect they both are, and yet how we rely on them to make sense of ourselves.  What shapes us? What do we let go of? What needs repair? We live in a time where so much is reduced and simplified that it feels important to push back and insist on a more nuanced and generous way to examine and re-examine our own lives.

Secondly, even as we look to the past and assess how good people tolerated egregious wrong, we must look at our own relationship with social compassion and justice. Homelessness, income inequity, and climate inaction are just a few of the issues that we’ve come to accept as “the water we swim in,” passively repeating the accepted moral logic of the day. When our children make art about 2025, what will our generation be judged for?

The role of women and gendered expectations is something you explore in your book. What was your experience growing up seeing these gender expectations play out in your family and community? 

The Sixties were a confusing time to be a girl. I was straddling ‘Gone with the Wind’, ‘Father Knows Best’, and ‘The Feminine Mystique’. I was arguing for permission to wear pants to school, watching Gloria Steinem and team in full feminist rage on TV, and consumed with trying to be like Nancy Drew. American women were taking the pill, challenging the idealization of the happy housewife, and arguing for equal pay.

This was all happening as visuals came alive in glossy magazines, electric billboards, and, for the first time, televisions in most American homes. Visual media taps a basic human behavior — to contrast and compare ourselves to others; the medium itself was transforming everything about American culture, especially it’s women. In these early days much of visual media was designed by men, portraying women as either a sex-kitten or a happy housewife. A cover of Esquire Magazine from 1967 has a young woman in a trash can, the headline reads “The New American Woman: through at 21”.  This is when the theory of ‘the male gaze’ emerged.

We wring our hands today about the impact of media on children, but it’s hard to overstate the media revolution of the Sixties and its influence in defining how we lived, and what it meant to be a girl.

As we see a terrifying regression on gender equality in so many ways, most notably with reproductive rights, why was it important for you to explore the topic of sexism? 

As agonizing as it is to see the recent regression in women’s rights, it’s important to know where we came from. Many aspects of the 60s regarding gender rights, racial justice, and inclusion would be unimaginable to young people today, and confirms that change has happened, however slow and unequal. The current political landscape confirms that we must stay vigilant.

You mention the “Southern Paradox of beauty juxtaposed with violence, defiance with shame”. Can you tell us more about what this is and how you hope your book will allow people to reframe or critically think about the South? 

The South holds a pivotal but uneasy place in the history of our country. Like many Southerners I am driven to try to make sense of this history we’ve inherited and justify it to the outside world. Still, I grew up in a good and moral family, and community. This book holds that paradox up for the readers’ consideration. It’s a visual memoir of one person’s experience, in which the past is mixed and folded into the stories I tell myself, and I am ‘sifting’ through this messy complicated legacy to decide what to hold onto, and what to let go.

You can order your copy of ‘I Still Speak Southern In My Head’, published through Workshop Arts. See more of Nancy Farese’s work on her website, and follow her on Instagram and Facebook.