Mississippi Delta Stories Told in Photographs at Gallery 169

2009-11-12
Walking into the exhibit of photographs by Rex Miller at g169 in Santa Monica Canyon feels a bit like traveling back in time.

  The black-and-white images of bluesmen'and women'of the Mississippi Delta look as if they had been taken in the 1930s or '40s, when some of the blues songs were first recorded.

  'He's so young,' one gallery-goer whispers behind Miller's back, clearly surprised to discover that the filmmaker/photographer is only 47.

  It's in part because his work looks like that of an old soul, comfortable 'just setting a spell' in a juke joint in Clarksdale or Greenville, listening to the music. But also in part because the photos, taken in the early 1990s, reflect a world less changed than most of this country in the last half century.

  The show opens a window into the Delta blues culture through music, words and images; recordings made by Miller play in the background and stories told by the musicians and others who lived the blues are posted alongside the photographs.

  The images hang in rough-hewn frames, and the words alongside are often rougher yet, describing lives filled with hard roads and much pain '- but all released, if only for the length of a song, in the blues.

  'Blues is a remedy for whatever it is that ails you. It's like a pressure value'when you release it, it releases some of the pressure. If you hurt, if there is something you don't like, sing the blues,' reads one quote in the show. It's scribbled on the wall next to a large print showing dozens of prisoners gathered in a yard at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. Four men in the center of the crowd are dancing, giving their bodies up fully to some unheard music.

  A camera, in the right hands, can always catch someone off guard and reveal something the subject may not intend. But the sentiments expressed in the printed stories here seem raw and honest enough that it's hard to imagine how Miller was able to elicit them, until he explains that he has been gathering them over nearly eight years.

  Frank Langen, the owner of g169, said that at first he wasn't interested in including the narratives in the exhibit, faithful to the idea that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.'

  But the words here illuminate the pictures, giving them additional power '- something Langen now appreciates. The images show the hard edges of the lives lived in the Delta, but the interviews are almost shocking in what they reveal.

  'I was sharecropping too long ' If you sharecropping with Mr. so-and-so, and you make 20 bales of cotton, you got to give him 10. He gets that free. No debts come of his 10. The debts be on you. All the poison, the tractor, the gas and all that come out of your 10, and when it winds up, you ain't got nothin'.

  That's the way sharecropping works. So, I said I'm gonna let that alone. I imagine you would, too,' reads part of an interview with blues musician James 'Son' Thomas.

  The words remind us that people still alive today grew up picking cotton, got a dollar a day 'if you was a good worker,' and lived with the fear of physical violence if they didn't do as they were told.

  The stories surely 'take the candy off the music,' as Arthneice 'Gas Man' Jones, one of Miller's subjects, says.

  Miller recorded the words and images while traveling through backwoods into tiny rural crossings and sleeping in shacks, making the acquaintance of bluesmen like Roosevelt 'Booba' Barnes and Mitch Pendelton and talking with gravediggers and preachers.

A shoot with B.B. King took Miller down the path to a serendipitous meeting with Worth Long, a folklorist and historian who organized black voters and documented the civil rights battles of the 1950s and '60s.

  Long opened doors for Miller across the Delta. And Miller himself was persistent in getting access to places like Parchman, working through a series of wardens and frustrating restrictions.

  But the artist also learned the value of just hanging around. There's something to be said for being in the right place at the right time ' but some of that luck is just relaxing into the moment enough to let something happen.

  'You couldn't show up, take a photo and leave,' Miller says, in the midst of a story about Barnes' Playboy Club. The venue is caught in one of Miller's images with a wild-eyed Barnes out front of an old brick furniture store, with many of its windows boarded-up and its signage spray-painted. Not much to look at, it was still a powerful music scene.

  Miller is clearly captivated by the blues, drawn by the 'amazing intensity of experience' to be found in the music.

  The photographer/filmmaker is currently shooting a documentary on Althea Gibson, a world-class tennis player in the 1950s and the first black, man or woman, to win Wimbledon. He's off to Forest Hills (once home to the U.S. Open), Palm Beach and other locations far removed from Mississippi.

  Miller cites his art as 'my excuse to go to strange, exotic places.'

  But the blues can't ever be that far behind.

  A minister interviewed by Miller quotes an 'old fella' as saying 'things that's come from the heart reaches the heart.' And Miller's heart is full of the Delta blues.

'All the Blues Gone' remains on view through January at 169 West Channel Rd. The gallery is open by appointment. Contact Frank Langen at 310-459-4481.