Southern Rites is an original and provocative twelve-year visual
study of one community’s struggle to confront longstanding
issues of race and equality. In 2009, The New York Times
Magazine published a photo-essay by Gillian Laub entitled, “A
Prom Divided,” which documented Georgia’s Montgomery
County High School’s racially segregated prom rituals. Laub’s
photographs ignited a firestorm of national outrage and led the
community to finally integrate. One year later, there was
newfound hope—a historic campaign to elect the county’s first
African American sheriff, yet the murder of a young black man—
portrayed in Laub’s earlier prom series—by a white town
patriarch, reopened old wounds. Through her intimate portraits
and first-hand testimony, Laub reveals the horror and
humanity of these complex, intertwined narratives. Her pictures
remain studies of individuals; a chronicle of their courage in the
face of injustice, of their suffering and redemption, possessing
an unsettling power.
