Film Photo Visionary Project Award: Graham Dickie
©Graham Dickie, Roosevelt Avenue. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. June 2019
Photographer Graham Dickie’s poignant project, How Life Is, recently garnered the Spring 2021 Film Photo Visionary Project Award. With the support of the Film Photo Award, Graham will continue photographing rap and daily life in Louisiana, with particular attention to the countryside surrounding Baton Rouge. The resulting project will approach the state’s street rap scene with a grassroots, humanistic perspective, focusing on young aspiring artists – how their music, with its deeply autobiographical underpinnings, connects to their communities and speaks to America’s broader reckoning over racial injustice.
The Film Photo Award is open to all emerging, established, and student photographers worldwide. Each award period provides three distinct grants of Kodak Professional Film and complimentary film processing by Griffin Editions to photographers who demonstrate a serious commitment to the field and are motivated to continue the development of still, film-based photography in the 21st century. The Spring 2021 grants were juried by Paddy Johnson of Art F City, previous Film Photo Award recipient Jon Henry, and Film Photo Award founder Eliot Dudik. IG @filmphotoaward
©Graham Dickie, Zachary, Louisiana. December 2018
Graham Dickie (b. 1995) is a photographer from Austin, Texas, USA currently based between Austin and rural Southeast Louisiana (Clinton – population 1,653), where he’s pursuing independent documentary projects while working closely with the local hip-hop community.
Graham graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 with highest honors in the Plan II honors program and journalism. While a student, he embedded with a small group of deaf journalists in Maputo, Mozambique; worked for a film studio in Austin on a documentary about the legendary newspaperman Gene Roberts; and filed radio reports from the National Public Radio member station in Marfa, Texas. He completed his thesis – on small-town Southern rap – under the supervision of photographer Eli Reed.
After graduation from UT, Graham followed the ancient Silk Road from Kazakhstan to Beijing, living there for nine months and working at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (三影堂摄影艺术中心), the leading space for photography in the country. From China he went to Scandinavia, where apprenticed with the Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol for much of 2018 while living on a remote stretch of Danish coastline.
From 2020 into 2021, Graham served as the annual photography intern at National Geographic. In 2019, he was named College Photographer of the Year by the CPOY competition for a portfolio of his work from the past year. He attended the 30th Eddie Adams Workshop in 2017, and in 2018 his work in rural Louisiana received first prize in the Alexia Foundation’s student grant competition, providing for a semester-long fellowship at Syracuse University.
©Graham Dickie, Sugarcane mill. Patoutville, Louisiana. December 2020
How Life Is
Baton Rouge, Louisiana and its surrounding countryside are home to hundreds of young people making rap music in order to express their reality in today’s South. The vicious cycle of rural poverty, the police shootings that have killed family members, the joy and faith that nevertheless persist inside them – these are some of the real subjects driving these artists’ deeply autobiographical music.
The last few months have seen a lot of conversation about how America can understand systemic racism and its broken justice system. Understandably, many have pointed to resources coming from intellectual circles, but with my photos, I want to help make an argument for the immense value of the folk art being recorded by young Black people in a place like Southeast Louisiana, who – living in the Deep South especially – bear an extremely heavy burden in terms of historical racism and oppression.
©Graham Dickie, Sherwood Forest. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. June 2019
Excluded by dominant social institutions for generations, young Black Southerners have forged their own avenues for expression, and yet I feel like their voices are still ignored by the quote-unquote cultural mainstream when, in fact, they have much to teach us. The street rap being made by young people in Southeast Louisiana – and daily life there – is challenging but raw and vital, of absolute relevance to our current reckoning. The melodies and words emerge directly from their community and sensitivity to daily life, and the songs present the voices of young Black Southerners on their own terms.
Louisiana street rap has enormous regional popularity and cultural impact, and recently achieved a high-water mark: in 2020, NBA Youngboy – a 21-year-old who grew up in the shadow of the colossal ExxonMobil chemical plant in North Baton Rouge – became one of very few solo artists in the world to have had three separate albums top the Billboard 200 within a year. This can be explained in part by the intimate bond he’s forged with listeners coming from backgrounds like his, making music that’s diaristic and vulnerable, swinging between exultation and heartbreak. (Youngboy’s album AI YoungBoy 2, from 2019, is a great introduction to Louisiana rap, emotionally poignant and technically superb.)
©Graham Dickie, Lettsworth, Louisiana. July 2020
©Graham Dickie, Nino on the porch. Zachary, Louisiana. August 2020
I want to show what life is like for these young artists in Baton Rouge and its hinterlands (which includes small towns like Zachary, Jackson, St. Francisville, Clinton, and Slaughter) – how their lives connect to their art and speak to these broader social issues in a time of necessary turmoil and soul-searching. I’ve been coming to Louisiana for close to five years now. It feels like home, and many of the friends I’ve made in the course of photographing there are dear to me. I’ve watched them grow as people and artists and in many ways I feel as if I’ve found my creative community here – in underground Louisiana street rap – rather than in “photography” so to speak.
I believe what these young people are making is folk art in the finest sense, something completely sui generis that speaks organically to their own lives and the people closest to them. My photography there originates from that respect and genuine feelings for what they’re doing, and visualizes some of what I hear in the music. Their approach is something we could all learn from as humans and artists. With almost no institutional support or resources, they find a way to make music and talk about what’s closest to them. – Graham Dickie
©Graham Dickie, Hammond, Louisiana. June 2019
©Graham Dickie, Tweezy’s house. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. July 2019
©Graham Dickie, Jackson, Louisiana. February 2021
©Graham Dickie, Delta. Baker, Louisiana. November 2019
©Graham Dickie, Zion City, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. July 2020
©Graham Dickie, The Bottom, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. June 2020
©Graham Dickie, Deer Creek. Zachary, Louisiana. August 2020
©Graham Dickie, Chadley Johnson, aka “Cut Up,” at home with his two children, Chad Love and Chastity. Scotlandville, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. December 2020
©Graham Dickie, Jackson, Louisiana. November 2019
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
