The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works on the American South | The New Yorker

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s vision of the American South pulls whiteness from its position as infinite and invisible “background,” as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, to instead examine the white body as a site of difference. This by no means translates to capturing only white subjects, as the system haunts any and all who have lived within its nightmarish logic. Like a foreigner—and there was, in fact, a formative period in her youth, in the Midwest, in which Fox Solomon’s Jewish ethnicity made her a person of suspicion—she looks for signs of otherness and strains of the self in the humid embrace of mother and child, the crushed doll, the dilapidated gate of the estate, the cold gaze of couples. These extraordinary portraits and scenes are not quite documentary, but they pursue a truth about fear, pleasure, confusion, family history, and who and what whiteness feeds on in order to cohere.