Forty years ago this week, I arrived in Tallahassee to take my first full-time university job. It was a nervous moment. After nearly eight years of graduate school, I was about to learn if I was any good at the career I'd prepared so long to begin.
Photographer Alex Harris’ new book, Our Strange New Land: Narrative Movie Sets in the American South, opens with a dream-like image of a young girl staring directly at the viewer from a darkened doorway, her arms reaching out to part a curtain of swinging beads. The photograph was made on the set of Roni Nicole Henderson-Day’s “And the People Could Fly,” a film, writes Henderson-Day in the essay she contributed to Harris’ book, “about the gravitas of life.”