Gillian Laub
Amber and Reggie, Mount Vernon, Georgia, 2011.
Good photos tell compelling stories of the people, places and actions they capture. Southern Rites, photographer Gillian Laub’s chronicle of modern-day segregation in Mount Vernon, Georgia, succeeds in all categories.
But Laub’s exhibit, which opened a semester-long run Jan. 24 at the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW-Madison campus, goes a step further. Her work, resulting from more than a decade of visits to the town 150 miles south of Atlanta, carries its own narrative arc. It’s a story characterized by success and tragedy, giving Laub’s powerful images a profound impact.
“This is a great blend of visuals paired with complex, deepening storytelling,” says Amy Gilman, the Chazen’s director and the one responsible for bringing the exhibit to Madison. “The origin story is completely happenstance.”
Gillian Laub
Sunday church, McRae, Georgia, 2014.
Laub, a UW alum, was shooting freelance photography for Spin magazine in 2002 when the publication received a letter from a Mount Vernon high school student pleading for someone to chronicle her town’s segregation practices. The high school was integrated, with black and white students freely mingling and even dating, but area tradition required the school to hold two separate proms each spring — one for black couples and one for white couples.
White couples could attend the black prom, but black or mixed-race couples could not attend the white prom. Should they try they would be stopped at the door and threatened with arrest for “trespassing.”
The large format photos on display chronicle those proms and their participants’ preparation. Well-dressed young people — both black and white — populate the pictures, but no one is smiling. Instead they look back at the lens with fear, accusation, frustration and sadness.
The 42 images are accompanied by 30 supporting objects, including high school yearbooks and a class writing assignment in which a student expressed her frustration over the proms. Her teacher replied that a high school principal who had staged an integrated prom in 1995 did not have his contract renewed.
Laub’s work resulted in a photo essay in The New York Times Magazine in 2009 and an HBO documentary, which the Chazen will screen on April 16 at Union South’s Marquee Theater. In 2009, the high school finally combined its proms.
Gillian Laub
Prom king and queen, dancing at the black prom, and Niesha with her children.
Sadly, that is not the end of the story.
In 2011, 22-year-old Justin Patterson and his brother Sha’von, two young black men, were invited for a late-night visit to the home of Danielle, a biracial young woman being raised by her uncle, a 62-year-old white man, Norman Neesmith. Danielle was there with her friend Brittany. Neesmith awoke, grabbed a handgun from his nightstand, and hustled the young men into the living room.
“I could kill you and no one would know,” Neesmith allegedly told the young men. They ran, and he fired four times, killing Justin as he fled.
A black cove within the Chazen exhibit shows a moody video behind a recording of Neesmith’s 911 call reporting the incident.
“I hate to say it, but I shot him,” Neesmith says to the dispatcher with a nervous laugh. “It was just a black boy.”
Laub knew Justin Patterson personally from the project. His murder, for which Neesmith served one year in a probationary facility, brings a frightening close to the exhibit, which runs through May 25.
