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Matinee: 'Gillian Laub's Southern Rites'
8 July 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 508th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Gillian Laub's Southern Rites.
As we noted in our July 6 Around The Horn, the Eastman Museum is currently exhibiting Gillian Laub: Southern Rites through the end of the year. In this 7:07 video, Laub talks about the project, showing us a few images from the exhibit. Curator Maya Benton also appears to discuss the importance of the project, which will be touring nationally.
Laub fell in love with photography, she tells us, when her grandfather gave her a Polaroid. She was six years old.
Her style is to engage with the people she is photographing. So when a friend who worked at Spin magazine (where Laub contributed), told her about a letter she had received from a student in distress, she jumped into her boots.
The student was upset because she couldn't take her boyfriend to the prom at Montgomery County High School in Mount Vernon, Georgia. He was black and she was white and the school had just instituted segregated proms. "Please come tell this story," the girl wrote.
Laub went down there in 2002 where she found homecoming was also segregated. And over the years, she kept returning to photograph the segregated events at the school.
"Why is this still going on?" she wondered.
In 2009, the New York Times Magazine published images from the project, drawing national attention to the issue. Following widespread outrage over the policy, the school was forced to integrate the proms the next year.
Laub wasn't exactly welcomed to return, she says. But she was allowed to attend and photograph the 2010 integrated prom.
That wasn't the end of the story, however.
It took a dark turn when Justin Patterson, one of the young people she was following, was murdered by an older white man. Laub followed the case to see if the family would get justice.
Some people in the community felt it was remarkable that the murder actually made it into the courts. A former black prom queen Laub had photographed told her they were used to taking one step forward and having to take two steps back around there.
It may not be clear if this is a story about progress or not. But it is clear it's a story about courage.