dana matthews – one farm one decade

Over thirty years ago, photographer Dana Matthews and writer Richard Giles met in the rural deep south. Matthews came from her grandmother’s farm and Giles from the Delta by way of farms in the Mississippi Black Belt. Between Matthews’s home in Alabama and Giles’s home in Mississippi lies Hale county Alabama, where Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated to make “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, that amazing document about people struggling to survive in places where food, hardship, beauty and hunger meet. These realities very much describe the lives of small-scale farmers in America today.