On Wednesday, August 24, we are thrilled to welcome back to Columbia Dr. Berkley Hudson, who will be in Skylark to discuss his extraordinary new book, O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South. This will be a talk illustrated with photographs from the book.
Photographer O. N. Pruitt (1891-1967) was for some forty years the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Columbus--known to locals as Possum Town. His body of work recalls many FSA photographers, but Pruitt was not an outsider with an agenda; he was a community member with intimate knowledge of the town and its residents. He photographed his fellow white citizens and Black ones as well, 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 of events in the moment, Pruitt's documentary of a specific yet representative southern town offers viewers today an invitation to meditate on the interrelations of photography, community, race, and historical memory.
Columbus native Berkley Hudson was photographed by Pruitt, and for more than three decades he has considered and curated Pruitt's expansive archive, both as a scholar of media and visual journalism and as a community member. This stunning book presents Pruitt's photography as never before, combining more than 190 images with a biographical introduction and Hudson's short essays and reflective captions on subjects such as religion, ethnic identity, the ordinary graces of everyday life, and the exercise of brutal power.
BERKLEY HUDSON worked for 25 years a magazine and newspaper writer and editor, and has taught in the University of Missouri School of Journalism. His former students, some of whom have won Pulitzer Prizes, work for media throughout the world. His research interests center on American media history, visual studies, interviewing, media representation of racial conflict and narrative journalism.
