Who Dat

“The South’s my landlord; and I’m trapped in its stomach trying to get to its brain.” With these words, RaMell Ross encapsulated the tension between people and place that he deploys in Who Dat. The work belongs to the series South County, Alabama, named after a region with a history of enslavement and a fraught relationship with its Black residents, but also the site of one of the country’s first civil rights associations. To make the series, Ross worked with Black residents to stage poetic, often enigmatic, tableaux for the camera.

Here, in the distance, one man crouches and one emerges from behind a tree, their faces blurry. In the foreground, a man leans against a tree, his face hidden behind the trunk, as another peeks his head around it, creating the illusion of a single body made of disparate parts. The men’s anonymity and peculiar poses embody the complicated juxtapositions Ross highlights in the series.