The Photographer Undoing the Myth of Appalachia – The Atlantic
If you wanted to understand why flipping through Stacy Kranitz’s recent photography book, As It Was Give(n) to Me, feels like plunging your head into ice water, you could ponder the omission of captions that might have contextualized her images of Appalachia. You could dwell on the dissonant chord struck by mixing beauty pageants, burning cars, and bloody teeth together on the page.
Or you could consider a moment in January 1944, when a lanky Kentucky soldier disembarked from a requisitioned passenger ship and stepped foot for the first time in French-mandate Morocco.
“The Arabs were a never failing source of amazement,” Harry Caudill wrote, recording his impressions in a column for his hometown newspaper, Whitesburg, Kentucky’s Mountain Eagle. “Most of the men carry long keen knives beneath their robes, and one would doubtless stab at his brother for a pair of shoes,” he continued. “They are indescribably filthy.”
Though his regiment eventually deployed to Italy, Caudill chose to focus a significant portion of his column on his peregrinations in Casablanca. Other soldiers had written about the battlefields of Europe; Caudill could claim a niche by representing Morocco, at least as he imagined it. His descriptions—of wily men and their hordes of veiled wives, of a constant chorus of braying donkeys and mournful flute notes—evoke the tropes of what Edward Said would later call “Orientalism.” Never mind that few of his details withstand serious factual scrutiny; Caudill could define Morocco and its people for the readers of The Mountain Eagle however he pleased.
After the war, Caudill returned to Kentucky and finished a law degree. Years later, he resumed writing, now about an area closer to home: Appalachia. His work, published in The Atlantic and in a series of best-selling books, forced the United States to pay attention to the region, and established Caudill as its unofficial spokesperson. In his reports from Appalachia, Caudill adopted the same authoritative tone and looseness with facts that he had wielded in his writing on Morocco; this time, though, it was his own neighbors whom he cast as exotic.
These days, Caudill is less of a household name than he once was, but his portrayal of Appalachia has stuck. Journalists and photographers flooded into the region in the 1960s, drawn in …….