O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble & Resilience in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
Describe the focus of your book.
Photographer O. N. Pruitt (1891–1967) for forty years was the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Columbus—known to locals as “Possum Town.” His work recalls many Farm Security Administration photographers, but Pruitt was not an outsider; he was a community member with intimate knowledge of the town.
He photographed fellow white citizens and Black ones, too, in circumstances ranging from the mundane to the horrific: family picnics, parades, river baptisms, carnivals, fires, funerals, two of Mississippi’s last public and legal executions by hanging, and a lynching. From formal portraits to candid images, Pruitt’s documentary of a specific yet representative southern town offers viewers an invitation to meditate on the interrelations of photography, community, race, culture, and historical memory. The book is a companion to an NEH-traveling exhibition.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
Pruitt was the “picture man” of my town. He photographed my family and me when I was a boy. After Pruitt retired in 1960, he sold his business to his assistant, Calvin Shanks. In the early 1970s, when I was in college making pictures and writing journalistic stories, two of my friends took me to Mr. Shanks’ studio to see a treasure trove: wooden and pasteboard boxes with thousands of Pruitt’s negatives, including glass plate ones from the 1920s. The negatives were off gassing, smelling to high heaven.
We were flabbergasted and captivated. It took a decade more, but four boyhood white friends and I acquired the collection in 1987. We wanted to preserve, research, publish, and exhibit the images. As we waded into the collection, we discovered a photobiography of our American South, in visual form.
What archives or research materials did you use?
An estimated 88,000 glass and film Pruitt negatives and prints served as a key source. The book contains a bibliographic essay, entitled “Reading Pruitt.” I outline three broad categories: Photographic and Documentary Studies, Southern History and Culture, and Oral History, Ethnography and Folklore. The book lists 41 oral history interviews conducted by me and others, starting in 1974.
Libraries included Columbus-Lowndes Public Library; University of Mississippi Library; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries; University of Missouri Libraries; Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and Library of Congress. In Germany, I visited the newspaper archives of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
I relied upon bound volumes and microfilm and microfiche of local, regional, and national newspapers, especially the Columbus Commercial Dispatch, Chicago Defender, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times. I read bound volumes of Atlantic, Ebony, Life and Time. My dissertation carrel twenty years ago had 200 books. Shelves nearby held books such as Congressional records from 1872: “Testimony by the Joint Select Committee in Inquire into the Condition of Affairs of the Late Insurrectionary States: Mississippi.”
I followed my dissertation committee member Dr. Don Shaw’s advice to seek evidence in geographical landscape, rivers, and creeks and built structures. I relied upon two cemeteries in Columbus, dating from the 19th Century: Friendship, essentially for whites, and Sandfield, for Blacks. I utilized the Lowndes County Courthouse, its legal records inside, Confederate monument outside. Poetry, art, literature, and music of Mississippi artists provided evidence.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
When I worked as a Los Angeles Times journalist in the 1990s and was researching Pruitt, I knew a partial answer: Pruitt was a jack-of-all-trades photographer making studio portraits, commercial pictures, images for law enforcement, attorneys, and insurance companies, and journalistic pictures for his local newspaper.
As I would find one image, I started to answer riddles: Who is pictured? Why? Who is missing? Journalism history unfolded before my eyes. In the pre-Google era, I worked with no captions, no information beyond the physical evidence of a print or negative. I read the entire run of the Commercial Dispatch and predecessor papers, from 1915 to 1960. I made discoveries in the 1934 New York Herald Tribune, the Atlanta Daily World, and Pittsburgh Courier, 1935 Chicago Defenders, and Ebony Magazine, 1957. Newsreels from Fox Movietone and Paramount Pictures, and books on bird dogs yielded Pruitt media stories.
Dr. Margaret Blanchard at UNC Chapel Hill became my dissertation advisor, expanding how my research connected past and present. I began to understand the Pruitt pictures were, as my mentor former NEH chairman William Ferris would declare, “a national treasure.”
Dr. Blanchard helped me see how Pruitt’s work is emblematic of small communities—the heart and soul of the South in the first half of the 20th century—represented what occurred. Pruitt filtered a broad range of life through his perspective—a white man in a racially segregated society. He created an arresting visual record, including a journalistic one. A record standing apart from written documents such as dairies, journals, letters, magazines, or newspapers of the region. The pictures are a storehouse revealing complexity of race, class, gender, identity, religion, and culture.
Pruitt fits squarely into journalism history and links with contemporary debates such as federal support for Black farmers in the American South; the death penalty, racial violence, enslavement reparations, educational, economic, religious issues. Pruitt offers insights into photographic practice and technological changes from the days of a freelancer’s large format, full-frame images that provide instruction in lighting, composition, and aesthetics.
What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?
Persevere. Rest when you need rest. Find people to help you do that. Financial, intellectual, and emotional support flows from this. Be clear what you need from family and friends, what they need from you.
Though it’s a cliché, I followed my bliss, Joseph Campbell style. Mine has been a winding path of narratives, heartbreaking difficulties, amazing discoveries, and meetings with remarkable people. I had four hometown boyhood friends who helped me initially: Jim Carnes, David Gooch, Mark Gooch, and Birney Imes. Even today, they provide insights. Yet, for the last twenty-five years, I’ve charted my path essentially without them.
Seek funding from all reputable sources. Donations as small as $25 and NEH grants totaling $190,000 and many other Mizzou and private grants have supported this work. In 2017, a McKerns Research Grant from the American Journalism Historians Association came at a critical time.
Reach out to the best scholars and ordinary folk. Express your gratitude to them. I’ve been fortunate to have mentors from all over—ones I met at conferences in South Korea or Germany or ones in Mississippi libraries. I cold-called photograph historian Michael Lesy; we talked 45 minutes. I lunched with photographic studies innovator Alan Tratchenberg of Yale. I studied at UNC with MacArthur Fellow Deborah Willis. Bryan Stevenson, a genius with how he uses his time, met me one day when he was giving a presentation at Mizzou; later, he wrote a powerful support letter for the project.
Find a supportive publisher. I worked with UNC Press to develop my book in the Documentary Arts and Culture Series, published in partnership with Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. With help of my editors, including Duke’s Tom Rankin, we positioned the book as public scholarship. We struck a balance between words and pictures, with an emphasis on photographs. With purposeful sequencing, the book presents compelling visual stories with detailed written context.
To anyone reading this, I’d be glad to talk with you. This is how I repay the debt accrued from so many who helped this book come to fruition. That includes Pruitt, his subjects, and those who lived stories of joy, suffering, sorrow, and resilience that the images reveal.