The Mississippi Delta 30: Lee's Cotton Picker Art Gallery, Rolling Fork, Mississippi

Lee's Cotton Picker Art Gallery, Rolling Fork, Mississippi (Fuji Acros film, Voigtländer Vito BL camera, 50mm f/3.5 Color-Skopar lens). Click any picture to expand to 1600 pixels wide.

Rolling Fork is a typical Mississippi Delta agricultural town only about an hour north of Vicksburg. I had not been to downtown Rolling Fork in several years and was surprised to see a new art gallery on Walnut Street.

I stopped and met Mr. Lee Washington, a friendly gent who was doing some welding in his shop. He uses the spindles from cotton harvesting machines as well as other metal bits for his art. Mr. Washington graciously let me take some photographs.

The porch is a wealth of neat stuff, bottle trees, and contraptions.

The inside of the gallery is especially interesting. My Vito BL camera has a fixed 50mm lens, so there was no way to capture the entire scene in one frame. These are 1 second exposures with the camera mounted on a tripod.

Across the street: a Highway 61 mural on the side of the Sharkey-Issaquena Library. Well done!!

All photographs are from Fuji Acros 100 black and white film, exposed with my 1957-vintage Voigtländer Vito BL camera with a 50mm ƒ/3.5 Color-Skopar lens. This is an impressive unit-focussing 4-element Tessar-type lens. As you can see in frame 3 above, there is only the slightest amount of flare or blooming around the fluorescent lamps. The lens is coated with a blue-purple coating. If you are interested in details, I wrote about this camera on the 35MMC blog.

A Pocket of Hope in Detroit, the Heidelberg Project

Detroit, Michigan, This once-great industrial city is situated on the Detroit River and was the birthplace of the American automobile industry. It was also the industrial powerhouse that turned out vast amounts of munitions, airplanes, and military vehicles that helped us win World War II. But since the 1960s, it has also become an infamous example of urban decay taken to such an extreme extent, it boggles the mind. This was not a war zone, like Stalingrad in 1942; it was self-imposed decay caused by decades of racial strife, corruption, incompetence, theft, greed, and stupidity. Are there any more terms we can apply? Several former mayors were jailed for corruption. As of 2014, the city is in bankruptcy. But there are pockets of hope. One of these is the Heidelberg Project, a neighborhood of art projects that attracts tourists and shows that something creative can be extracted from the mess. The Project even has a web page.

Walk around, and you see houses covered with teddy bears, signs, balls, puffy things, and bits of plumbing. Even the street has dots. Some of the houses are occupied; some are only used during the day for classes or projects.

If you want, you can also have little lions, ducks, dragons, and monkeys.

Stop to look at the details. There are plenty of non-subtle comments on the American consumer society, the gun mystique, poisonous foods, and legal drugs.

The famous buried Hummer. These people really, really did not like Hummers. Or maybe they liked them because they were such an extreme example of modern American consumer society and its cult of self-gratification via gross material possessions.

The pink bicycle is just in front of the pink Hummer.

Unfortunately, all you need to do is walk a block or two to either side of Heidelberg, and you see stark evidence of what has befallen much of Detroit: abandoned houses, fields, tatty signs, and closed stores.

Not all is well even here. Arson is cheap entertainment in Detroit, and even the Heidelberg Project was not immune. From their web page:

Just before 3:00AM on March 7th, the colorful Party Animal House (a favorite of children) located on Mt. Elliot (between Heidelberg and Elba Streets) was destroyed by arson, the 9th fire over an 11-month period. Though DFD responded within five minutes of the first call, their focus quickly shifted from the already destroyed Art Installation, to protecting the adjacent home of longtime residents. Though the neighboring structure suffered significant water and fire damage, its residents were unharmed and remain in surprisingly good spirits. This is the ninth fire set at the internationally renowned art environment since May, 2013, when The Obstruction of Justice house was first set ablaze.

Another essay on the arson at the Heidelberg is from David Uberti.

We will look at more Detroit photographs in future articles. Click for photographs of the International Waterfront. Heidelberg photographs were taken in 2010 with an Olympus E-330 digital camera and the Olympus 14-54mm lens. I reprocessed the RAW files with PhotoNinja software.

Update June 6, 2017: Some powerful black and white film photographs from south Detroit:
https://www.35mmc.com/04/06/2017/35mm-large-format-detroit/

Margaret's Grocery, Vicksburg, Mississippi: revisited 2010 and 2011

On February 19, 2011, Governor Haley Barbour proclaimed the week of March 20 to 26 the "Rev. Herman D. Dennis and Margaret's Grocery Awareness and Preservation Week." To remind viewers who are not familiar with the story, the Rev. Dennis married Margaret in 1984 and spent two decades decorating the old grocery store as a "Bible Temple to God." Margaret passed away in 2009 and the Rev. now lives in a nursing home in Vicksburg.



In some earlier posts, I showed how brilliant the colors where in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the Rev. moved away, the Temple has deteriorated from weather and vandalism. The paint has faded, ornaments have fallen down, and termites are eating the building. In this post are photographs from late 2010 and early 2011. The three scenes above show the front porch area.




The Reverend's creativity was amazing. He used any material he could get his hands on and painted, glued, and reassembled these items as part of his art.



Posted in the porch were old newspaper clipping describing Margaret's Gro. Some reported on the many international tourists who sought out the site, including Germans, who were particularly interested. According to Reverend Dennis, he learned his skill of brick laying from German prisoners at the POW camp, where he was a camp guard. He told me many years ago that he admired their skill.


Here is the bus that the Rev. used for his ministrations.



On March 20, Congressman Bennie Thompson met with a group of Reverend Dennis' supporters and local citizens at the King's Empowerment Center. They discussed options for preserving the store and the art. The Rev. came and was delighted to be there. Afterward, a few of the group went to the old store and had a chance to look inside. The Rev. preached in his bus, in as good form as ever.

More Views of Margaret's Grocery, N. Washington Street, Vicksburg

I found some more old photographs of Margaret's Grocery at 4535 North Washington Street that I wanted to share with you readers. The first is another April 1996 view of the north end of the complex. Notice the bus is already in place. I had not noticed it before and am not sure when this acquisition was added to the collection.

Here is the bus in March 2002, with its checkerboard paint motif. I took this late in the day, when the light was fading. This is a Kodachrome slide taken with a Leica rangefinder camera and a 20 mm Russar lens.

Finally, here is the unique doorway with newspaper clippings from around the country describing the Gro. It was an amazing place and I wish I had taken more photographs back in its prime.