Lisa McCord – Rotan Switch – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Lee Halvorsen •

Lisa McCord’s “Rotan Switch” is a superb synthesis of content, design, and emotion…more than a story, more than photos, more than a book, it’s an experience. The design is unique and subtly compelling. At first look, the white space, the seemingly random text blocks, and the image arrangement didn’t click with me but just a few pages in, everything fell into place: the layout was interactive…as if I were having a conversation with McCord. The book transported me to the front porch of her grandparent’s cotton farm in Rotan, Arkansas, and McCord is telling me about this place, the people who lived here, and the time she’d spent growing up here.

The book’s story arc is not typical which is why the design of text, images, and captions is so critical. Imagine the author telling you about an event that happened years ago in the yard in front of you…she then pauses to show you a snapshot of what she’s talking about and says, “Oh and that’s my sister and my grandfather and my friend Cheryl. Oh, and here’s another shot of them in the same place. And…of course, that’s…” No page numbers exist which leaves you free to explore and discover as the conversation takes you.

There are large text blocks on pages of mostly white space; the large blocks are the meat of the word story. The smaller text blocks are captions to images on pages that follow. The images follow the story snippets and draw the reader deeper into the family’s lives. Most of the time, I read the story, then looked at the image and paged back to the captions. Sometimes, not often, I read the captions before looking at the images.

McCord made most of the images in the book on or around the family farm although she used ‘found’ images to further illustrate the environment. The images are deeply personal and begin early, when her 16-year-old mother was giving the author a bath in the sink. Time on a cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta was a life of contrasts and work and privilege and hardship. McCord’s images capture the lives of everyone in Rotan regardless of race or religion, she gradually discovered the concept and practice of discrimination.

Her grandfather had been a sharecropper who built a successful farm with many employees and tenants. McCord and her camera blurred the sharp divide between races and religion privilege and need…McCord touches on those emotions in her story.

People are the stars of the book’s images. But, not just people, people captured in the texture and complexity of how they were living at that moment, moments of joy, labor, celebration, family, challenge, fear, and faith. We meet McCord’s family. We get to know Cully, the lady who cared for McCord when she was a baby and worked for her grandparents. We meet the kids close to the farm, people in church, people in the café, playing cards, writing recipes, taking polaroids…all deeply personal, intense slices of time. We peek into a ”juke,” an informal, weekend bar where mostly Black workers gather to have a beer, play pool and relax. A juke that was burned down three times. We can feel the heat of the Delta as we watch Cully cook in a hot kitchen in her bra, a common practice in the area.

So, if you want to have a chat with Lisa McCord about growing up in the South on a cotton farm, this book is probably the quickest way to start the conversation. The images are gripping, the story is compelling, and the design is incredibly innovative. A fabulous story brought alive through images and design.

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Lee Halvorsen is a contributing editor and visual artist.

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Rotan Switch, Lisa McCord

Photographer: Lisa McCord, born in Rotan, Arkansas, currently working and living in Los Angeles, CA and Rotan, AR

Contributors: Lisa McCord with Alexa Dilworth, foreword, and Lonnie Graham and Aline Smithson, afterword

Language: English

Clothbound hardcover, 204 pages, 25 color photographs and 55 tritone photographs, 23 x 29.9cm, ISBN 978-3-96900-151-6

Art Direction and Design: Caleb Cain Marcus (Luminosity Lab)

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