Journalism Professor Emphasizes Significance Of Place In New Photography Exhibit

“Portraits in Place,” the images exhibition by University of Mississippi Associate Professor of Journalism Mark Dolan, debuted with a gap reception on Thursday, Feb. 19 in Barnard Observatory. The show options quite a few black-and-white portraits, documenting Dolan’s journey throughout the South to pinpoint the deep connection between folks and their properties. 

“All of the people in the project are people who exhibit or show a strong tie to place — people for whom place is everything,” Dolan mentioned. “If you separated them from their roots, from where they stand, from where they live, from where they’ve worked, from where they sleep, from where they dream, it would almost be as if they cease to exist.” 

Each portrait connects to an oral historical past of a Southerner. 

“It’s 24 photographs out of a project that consisted of 50 photographs,” Dolan mentioned. “They’re 50 oral histories, narrative profiles of people from across the South that I interviewed across 23,000 miles of road journey.”

The undertaking started together with his need for dialog and reference to folks and an urge to know them on a deeper stage.

“The idea for the project was to talk to people in person, to value their front porch, their living room,” Dolan mentioned. “All the interviews took place in homes, or in backyards, with a few exceptions where people worked, which was like their home.”

Dolan mentioned he typically received to know interviewees deeply and developed many friendships all through his journey. 

“In many instances, I would stay like a day in that person’s house,” Dolan mentioned. “In some cases, I spend a weekend, or I’d have a hard time getting away and people said, ‘Can you just stay for the week?’ or something like that.”

Dolan’s final aim was to memorialize folks’s reference to their dwelling or office and the way it formed who they’re. 

“The idea was to honor people’s memories and their stories and their life in a place,” Dolan mentioned. “And at the same time, to engage in conversation with people.”

During the reception, Dolan spoke of his first inspiration for the undertaking — lengthy street journeys together with his mom.

“It began in 2019, after having taken my mother on a lot of road trips around the South,” Dolan mentioned. “As we would go, I would just create these voice memos and create all the history recordings of those.” 

While the undertaking started with rapid household, it quickly grew and expanded to incorporate different folks in Dolan’s life.

“It started to sort of spread in a sense, to colleagues and to relatives of students whom I had taught,” Dolan mentioned. “It started to sort of snowball and branch out from there until it started to be something that involved the whole South.” 

The exhibition captured the range of the portraits, unified with the overarching theme of personhood formed by place. 

“Place defines us, and that’s sort of the premise of the project,” Dolan mentioned. “You are the place and the place is you. It’s disarmingly simple in a way, but it opens a lot to think about.” 

 

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