Small Towns, Black Lives: African American Communities in Southern New Jersey

Rating:
Summary: Thought Evoking and Visually Stunning
Review: I found Small Towns, Black Lives to be visually stunning, historically intriguing and extremely thought evoking. This book invites the reader to discover, vicariously through an artist's personal journey and experience, black communities in Southern New Jersey. The beautifully captivating black and white photographs of people, buildings and meaningful landscapes are juxtaposed with thoughtful and informative text, which discreetly reveals these small communities to the reader. The photographs also appear to hint at volumes of dormant historical facts and information that has been unearthed and gathered by Wendel A. White. Both photographs and text provide a glimpse into the lives of a community that otherwise may have been overlooked. The essays in the book provide unique points of view from highly regarded educators, writers and artists as well as "food-for-thought" for the reader. The essays also provide supplementary resources of history and understanding in conjunction with what Wendel A. White has revealed of Small Towns, Black Lives.

I highly recommend Small Towns, Black Lives and urge that it be placed in classrooms, on coffee tables, and anyplace else where people can sit back and enjoy what unfolds from page to page.

Rating:
Summary: A Significant and Beautiful Work
Review: Wendel White's _Small Towns, Black Lives_ is a significant and beautiful
book.

It is significant because White has revealed a little-known fact of
American life: that African-Americans occupied private places not easily
found on maps and, further, he has exposed the success of those lives in
those places. The work is filled with incredible photographs of black
schoolteachers, barbers, funeral directors and farmers who built their
own homes, gardened their land, sold their produce, raised their
families and taught their children. They did all of this in small towns
generally unnoticed by the larger society. A metaphoric example is
telling. On page 97, White has photographed a tiny cemetery headstone
covered with brush, fence posts and the flotsam of an uncaring society.
On the next page, after the abandoned cemetery has been cleared, White
again photographs the tiny headstone only, this time, it stands
surviving and dignified. White has uncovered black lives which, seen
through his eyes, stand revealed as surviving and incredibly dignified
in their simplicities.

The work is beautiful because of the stark power of his vision of how a
photograph and text can be united in reflecting the lives of those he
portrays. Struggling to express both the present state and the historic
subtext of these places and these lives, Wendel White fuses text and
picture into a whole thing. White, whose career as a photographer is
long and varied, has found that digital art has opened new
possibilities. Each print of this text has been carefully and thoroughly
shaped in digital media so that subtlety of black and white tones
underpin the subjects of the picture itself. For me, the photographs of
the old, segregated schools and abandoned black churches speak volumes
of the textures of the lives that learned and worshipped in those
places. They reveal the beauty of what survives and the sadness of what
we have all lost in their passing.

As I said, this is a significant and beautiful work; it touches all of
us and, in doing that, preserves what was almost lost.

kt