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A year into Donald Trump’s presidency, the Scottish photographer Robbie Lawrence traveled with the American writer Sala Patterson through the Low Country, a coastal region straddling Georgia and South Carolina. The aim was to document the issues driving the US news cycle on a more humane level, through the lens of one place in America.
The result is Lawrence’s first monograph, Blackwater River, a collection of “anti-portraits” of people and landscapes that resist the clear-cut narratives propagated through the media.
The book takes its name from the local moniker of the Ogeechee river, which finishes its 245-mile run through the south-eastern United States by emptying itself into the Atlantic. Slow-moving and the colour of coffee, the river is known for its surface, which perfectly reflects overhanging tree branches while masking the fish and snakes lurking within its waters.
This river, once a source of livelihood and leisure for surrounding communities, is now the locus of industrial pollution, rampant development, and climate change-induced sea level rises. In 2011, some 38,000 fish died due to illegal wastewater discharge from a local textile mill. Fishermen say the seemingly luxuriant nature still feels empty. Further out, on the coast, the historic shrimping industry has seen its prices cut more than half, notably because of competition from imports. And in nearby Savannah, there has been a surge in violent crime, often involving young black men, which locals attribute to a confluence of factors, from gangs and gentrification to economic stagnation.
The book gently probes these issues and their ricochet effect through local people and landscapes. But as Patterson writes, Blackwater River yields more of a collection of impressions rather than a deep understanding of a place.
And what impressions these are. A painter by training, Lawrence draws his palette upon Dutch Masters and the French Fauvists. His images feel as lush and secretive as velvet. Wild roses and satsumas glow like ornaments on a Christmas tree, while the stained glass of a church interior is made as tangible and sweet as a soft-centered fruit jelly.
His unstaged portraits are intimate, yet protective of the person’s interior landscape. They show them mid-sentence or lost in thought, inviting our curiosity while keeping us at bay.
The light shifts through the book from honey to ruby as time passes from sunrise to sunset, taking us through a day in the Low Country. Life is as slow moving as the slow river, which is always present, even when its shorelines are some miles away. Lawrence’s images and Patterson’s words flow forward to hold us within their reflections, each as striking and elusive as the mirrored surface of the Ogeechee.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Edmée Lepercq
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For further viewing, visit STANLEY / BARKER
