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K e n L i g h t D e l t a T i m e
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| Ken Light's Delta Time series is the culmination of four years of documentary work in one of the poorest regions in the country, the Mississippi Delta. With a steady and compassionate eye, Light explores the intricacies of the humid Southern landscape--its dense cotton fields, dusty back roads, sagging architecture, and humble churches--and chronicles the poverty, the weariness, and the dignity of its black citizens. To the urban viewer, the Delta will seem a place suspended in time--a forgotten community in which living conditions and race relations have improved remarkably little since the Civil War. "For me and my generation," Light writes in the book Delta Time, "Mississippi had become a symbol of the failures of American society." Light, whose other documentary projects include death row inmates and the flight of undocumented aliens across the Mexican/American border, pushes through the hopelessness of such a sentiment to produce straightforward and powerful images that demand the attention that this forgotten community deserves. |