It's amazing. I live in the south. I grew up here and there is a weird hard to define line you have to walk as an artist between the grotesque and the real. You know. I mean a photograph, even a journalistic one, is only one moment and isn't true so much as the idea of true. Dave Anderson's book is beautiful because he's really good at what does. I never got how he was making anyone look bad.
I was shooting in this little cross roads town that you wouldn't even know about even if you lived here. We where shooting around an old bottle club across a dirt road from a trailer park. A lady got out her trailer, drove twenty feet across the street to the bottle club and started yelling at us to leave. It's a weird place.
My wife, who grew up in a real small southern town, Lake Butler, says people live in small towns to not be noticed. They don't want understanding or recognition. They mostly just want to be left alone. I think Dave Anderson's book is real nice but I get how angry they are. I'm surprised he seems so confused. It has nothing to with the pictures. I mean everyone seems to be saying that. It's the attention.
BennyC
