Southern Women Photographers in the News

The New York Times [LENS] blog brings news of a forthcoming publication entitled MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. 

Among the photographs by Southern photographers included in this volume is work by Atlanta-based photographer Akili-Casundra Ramsess (see image above) and by Atlanta-based photographer Sheila Pree Bright  (see image below).

 
Also featured in MFON is work made in the South, in Arkansas, by New York-based photographer Nina Robinson (see image below).

Robinson's work in Arkansas has previously been featured on the NYTimes [LENS] blog, here. 

Also featured in MFON is work made in the South, in Memphis, by New York-based photographer Kameelah Janan Rasheed (see image above).

You can support the publication of MFON and order your own copy by going here.

Also having work published lately -- and on a topic related to the work featured above, is Lexington, KY-based photographer Sarah Hoskins (see image above), whose photographs of African-American residents of Appalachia appear in Politico Magazine, go here.

Katelyn Fossett, writing in Politico, notes that because of its racial diversity, the town of Lynch, KY stands in stark contrast to the rest of the region.

Fossett says that "In the early 20th century, when the coal industry was booming across Appalachia, coal companies used labor agents to recruit a racially and ethnically diverse labor supply for the mines." 

"Now," writes Fossett, "after a decades-long decline in the coal industry, many of those black families have left for urban centers on the coasts, leaving behind shells of former coal towns. Lynch, Kentucky, with its mere 800 residents left behind from the collapse of coal and the resulting out-migration, is one such community."

Hoskins, a photographer with experience documenting black communities in Kentucky, was invited to Lunch last year by Karida Brown, a sociologist at UCLA and descendant of black coal miners from Lynch, who has spent years conducting oral history interviews with black residents and former residents of Lynch and the surrounding area.

 

The portrait of Lynch, and of Appalachia, that Hoskins gives us in these images is "much more complicated than what she had heard and read about the region." 

You can find more of Hoskins' work in Kentucky on her website, here.