Southern Gothic

Images of the American South where beauty and menace meet: decaying houses, eerie figures and the weight of a troubled past.

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No open-access works for Southern Gothic are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

The term comes from literature, from the decaying houses, family secrets and grotesque humour in the fiction of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. In art it describes images of the American South in which beauty and threat sit close together, and the legacy of slavery and poverty presses on the present.

Photography has been its main medium. Clarence John Laughlin staged eerie scenes among crumbling Louisiana plantation houses in Ghosts Along the Mississippi (1948). In Kentucky, Ralph Eugene Meatyard photographed family and friends in abandoned farmhouses in the 1950s and 1960s, blurring them into ghostly presences. Mike Disfarmer's plain studio portraits of farming families in Heber Springs, Arkansas, have an unsettling stillness. William Christenberry returned for decades to the same weathered buildings in Hale County, Alabama, photographing them as they sagged and disappeared. Look for peeling paint, overgrown yards and a sense that the past is not over.