In “A Town Under Trial,” from our Spring 2017 issue, reporter Nick Tabor relates how an unsolved 1994 double murder continues to haunt a small town in southwest Kentucky. To capture Oak Grove and its trailer parks and “commercial strips of liquor stores, topless bars, and cash-advance shops” familiar to military towns across the country, we enlisted Nashville-based photographer Tamara Reynolds, who was already familiar with the area. Her images convey the tenuous, transitory nature of habitation and commerce in Oak Grove and the unavoidable influence of the military-industrial complex on life there.
Travels with Robert Palmer: photographs from the Delta.
What became clear as we began our journey together, searching for the roots of the blues, was that the music is part of the Delta landscape and the people we encountered were carrying on an important tradition that spanned many decades. My goal was to visually depict their lives and their love of the musical tradition in which they lived.
Jonathan Blitzer’s “Crossing Over” chronicles the remarkable life of Claudia Delfín, a forty-seven-year-old transgender woman from El Paso whose reality has been shaped by the U.S.–Mexico border. This collection of photographs provides a chance to delve even deeper into Claudia’s world.
Armando Alvarez’s photographs have been published several times in the Oxford American, and we love following his work on Instagram, where he posts portraits of overflowing trash cans, hazy Houston landscapes, strangely beautiful still lifes of junk food, and much more. Most recently, we printed his image of an old truck surrounded by fog in our Texas music issue.
Seven photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Central Kentucky in the 1960s was a gathering place for unusual talent. Guy Davenport wrote, painted, and taught in Lexington with his friend the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard just down the road. Wendell Berry was around, too, teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, until he moved up to Henry County to farm. Thomas Merton lived in a country monastery to the southeast.
For more than two decades, Terri Garland has explored the many ways in which class and racial discrimination are woven into our national cultural fabric. This photo essay shows how these systems are directly contributing to the disintegration of the Louisiana coastline.
“We’ll show you anything you want to see," McGhee said, "but we’ll have to ask that you stand over by the shop when we kill the hog. That’s just out of respect for the animal. What happens over there is between me, my wife, and the pig.”
