Mississippi Department of Archives and History will host History Is Lunch Wednesday when Berkley Hudson will present “Pruitt’s Historic Columbus Photographs.” The program will also be livestreamed on Facebook.
The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North St., Jackson.
A Columbus native, Hudson is the author of the new book “O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South.”
For some 40 years, Otis Noel Pruitt (1891-1967) was the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County and Columbus — known to locals as “Possum Town.” His body of work recalls many Farm Security Administration photographers, but Pruitt was not an outsider with an agenda. He was a community member with intimate knowledge of the town and its residents.
Pruitt photographed his fellow white citizens and Black ones as well, in circumstances ranging from the mundane to the horrific: family picnics, parades, river baptisms, carnivals, fires, funerals, two of Mississippi’s last public and legal executions by hanging, and a lynching.
An exhibit featuring Pruitt’s work will open Feb. 3 at the Columbus Arts Council.
“From formal portraits to candid images of events in the moment, Pruitt’s documentary of a specific yet representative southern town offers viewers today an invitation to meditate on the interrelations of photography, community, race, and historical memory,” Hudson said.
Hudson was photographed by Pruitt. For more than three decades, he has considered and curated Pruitt’s archive, both as a scholar of media and visual journalism and as a community member. Hudson’s book presents Pruitt’s photography as never before, combining more than 190 images with a biographical introduction and Hudson’s short essays.
Breach of Peach author Eric Etheridge wrote: “Knockout images from a remarkable archive. Otis Noel Pruitt photographed his slice of Mississippi head on, omnivorously, leaving behind an encyclopedic record of Southern life in the early to mid-20th century. Look closely at these pictures. Embedded in their details are clues not only to a world long gone but the present moment as well.”
Hudson is emeritus associate professor of media history at the Missouri School of Journalism of the University of Missouri.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state’s past. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MDAHOfficial/. The videos are posted on the department’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/MDAHVideo.
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