The Errant Æsthete

PHOTOGRAPHS BY: FRED WOODWARD
May 14, 2008 - July 13, 2008

I took these pictures back in the late winter and early spring of 1986 in support of Nicholas Lemann’s “The Origins of the Underclass,” which ran in two parts in The Atlantic Monthly. Nick started his reporting in the Robert Taylor housing project on the South Side of Chicago—at one time, the largest of its kind in America, home to 27,000 people. During the course of his interviews, he was intrigued to meet so many residents who had come north from the same small town in Mississippi (Canton, population 14,000) and decided to make the trip to find out why they’d left. That northerly migration of so many African-American southerners, and all that they brought with them, became the core of his story and the basis for these photos.

Nick and I had met a couple of years before at Texas Monthly, and we became good friends. It was at the dinner table one night, while listening to him talk about this trip to Canton, that it was decided: I had to shoot the pictures. At the time, The Atlantic didn’t publish photographs, and I wasn’t a professional photographer. But that didn’t faze us.

Our pitch to his editor was built around the fact that I had grown up in Noxapater, Mississippi (population 500), not too far up the road from Canton, and knew the lay of the land. Nick vouched for my (still embryonic) photography skills. We didn’t mention that I’d never been to Chicago or, for that matter, had only ventured north of Memphis once or twice, until then.

The Atlantic ended up running a handful of my photographs. I put the negatives in a box and rarely looked at them again. …MORE…[via designobserver]