Andrew Moore's new book, Blue Alabama, focuses on the American South, depicts the economic, social and cultural divisions that characterize the South and the love of history, tradition and land that binds its citizens. Following upon in-depth explorations of the economically ravaged city of Detroit (2007 - 2009) and the mythic high plains region along the 100th Meridian (2011 - 2014), Blue Alabama continues the artist's investigation of "the inner empire" of the United States.
From white trash mill village girl to Senior-Cinderella. In Alabama Blue, Toni K. Pacini, shares her tumultuous journey. A girl raised-up like an invasive weed in an Alabama cotton mill village where illiteracy, bigotry, religious fanaticism, and abuse were as commonplace as fried chicken on Sunday. From pillar to post, and coast to coast, she sought a dauntingly illusive refuge. Toni fled a life predestined for sorrow from cold cradle to cold crypt, and she made it! Her life needed a major re-write, and in Alabama Blue, she rewrote the hopelessness into hope, the sorrow into joy, and left the past to rest, as she moved forward into a new tomorrow.
From one of the U.K.'s most dazzling authors comes a brutal and funny novel about a pair of fraudulent psychic mediums that is itself an elaborate con game between fact and fiction, life and death--a book as verbally acrobatic as it is emotionally intense.
Andrew Moore photographs places in transition: Cuba, Detroit, the High Plains. In his latest project, he focuses on Alabama--a region with a complex relationship to the past. Spending four years in lower Alabama, Moore searched for what he called "that 'deep history' which resides in the humblest of settings." And Alabama's Black Belt--named for its fertile soil and deeply associated with the region's African American culture--has that history. Before the Civil War, the region was the nation's highest producer of cotton. Afterward, it was the site of some of the Jim Crow era's most vicious violence and some of the Civil Rights Movement's key battles.Photographic history also runs thick through Alabama. The tenant farmers immortalized in James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) were residents, and some of the most famous images of the Civil Rights Movement--Bull Connor's police dogs in Birmingham, the standoff at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma--were produced here.Moore's photographs of the Black Belt honor its complicated histories but depart from them, avoiding stereotypes and finding the hope, resilience and creativity that animate this place. With the photographer acting "as a listener at history's doorstep," Blue Alabama offers a tender, surprising portrait of the South--a region marked by economic, social and cultural divisions, but also a love of history, tradition and land. The book includes a previously unpublished story by award-winning American novelist Madison Smartt Bell.
Winner of the Clinton Jackson Coley Award The 1878 City Directory of Montgomery, Alabama, included "A Brief History of Montgomery," consisting of a "narrative" and a series of events arranged by the months. Compiled by Matthew Powers Blue, this was the earliest history of a place that already served as the center of Deep South cotton culture and as the first capital of the Confederacy. Contemporary historian Mary Ann Neeley has annotated Blue's history to correct errors and clear up inconsistencies, and added other material on early churches, a genealogy of the colorful Blue family, and a Civil War diary by Blue's sister, Ellen. The book also includes many 19th century photographs.
