CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/15/2014

Eugene Richards: Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down

"You cross over the Mississippi into Arkansas, pass a few miles of strip malls, truck stops, and motels and the landscape comes to look like an abstract painting, with the wide, flat fields and the sky pressed together. There’s a migrant worker camp north of the interstate peppered with bullet holes, tractors in the distance throwing off dust, farmhouses here and there, but no people that you can see. It’s August and nothing much forces people indoors like the heat. You drive away from Marianna, with its statue of General Robert E. Lee and its dying downtown, and come to a cotton field where sharecroppers’ shacks used to stand, four or five of them in a row, up on concrete blocks. They had corrugated tin roofs that would lift and rattle in the wind and cracks in the windows that, when it was sunny, threw off dots of light. But because it’s growing too dark to take pictures, you sit there. In the sweltering heat and out of sight of the road you drift a little, see things: two little girls, like stick figures, chasing after each other into the shadows, then lurching back into sight; the row of sharecropper shacks being cleared by fire; the storekeeper in Wynne aiming his gun. And as happens whenever you return to the delta, the space between things that came to pass long years ago and the way it is now begins to collapse." Featured image, "Kequsha, Crawfordsville, AR" (2010), is reproduced from Eugene Richards: Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down.