Picturing the flag in the New South

ABSTRACT

This study draws on several thousand images submitted by 56 fine art photographers for the largest exhibition of photographs about the American South yet undertaken, Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, to investigate the cultural landscape of the region in the early twenty-first century. The prevalence of the flags of the Confederacy in cultural landscapes in the South highlights the endurance of longstanding white political identities there. More telling, however, is the understated power of the Stars and Stripes, often so taken for granted as to be almost invisible in photographs of the region. Fine art photographs open a window onto the cultural landscape of the New South that showcases charged political identities in the region while underlining the salience of Americanness there.

KEYWORDS:

• Flag
• New South
• Confederacy
• fine art photography
• cultural landscape
• political identity

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the Southbound photographers for their gracious permission to reproduce their images here and I would also like to thank the journal’s anonymous referees whose suggestions helped to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All images courtesy of the artists. All images copyright the artists.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Long

Trained in Ireland, Spain and the US, political geographer Mark Long is Professor of Political Science and Curator at Large and Academic Liaison at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA. His research is concerned with intersections between visual culture and place and he has published papers and essays on street art, editorial cartoons, and landscape photography. In his work as a curator, Long has curated shows of landscape photography from Antarctica to Afghanistan to the American West by award-winning American and international artists. In 2018, he co-curated Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, the largest exhibition of photographs from the American South yet undertaken; and in 2019 he was curator of Legitimacy of Landscape, an exhibition of Yaakov Israel’s photographs of the Arab Villages in Israel at the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem.