RAMELL ROSS, SOUTH COUNTY, AL (A HALE COUNTY), 2012
“Having lived, worked, and photographed in Hale County, Alabama, for almost ten years, RaMell Ross has produced a series of quietly powerful photographs—South County, AL (a Hale County)—that meditate on the myths of blackness in the American South. “To be black is the greatest fiction of my life,” Ross says. “Yet I’m still bound to its myth. I can’t help but think about the myth’s childhood and its backyard of the South. How the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws. How it evolved from there to become tacit, and join the secret order of things. How it became the dark matter of the American imagination.” - Aperture