Last week, the Virginia-based photographer Matt Eich hosted _The New Yorker’s Instagram feed from Greenwood, Mississippi, which he has been documenting for the past several years, for a project about the town’s race and class disparity.
Looking at Eich’s photographs put me in mind of the work of Danny Lyon, a photojournalist whose pictures, taken fifty years ago, have a similar focus. Lyon spent two years travelling through the Deep South as the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.), documenting the organization’s role in the civil-rights movement. He photographed many of the most famous moments of the era, including Black Monday, in Danville, Virginia; the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama; and the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. In 1963, he photographed Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger at the S.N.C.C.’s voter-registration drive in Greenwood, where Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song about the murder of the N.A.A.C.P. leader Medgar Evers.
Eich says that Greenwood, still grappling with its civil-rights legacy, continues to struggle with racial inequality: > The people I am interacting with are living in the wake of that tumultuous time period …. There is still a deep disparity when it comes to education, opportunities, and socioeconomic standing in the community. This is why I have focussed so much here, though I feel I am still far from being done. The challenge is to create images that function in a way that engages the residents. When it’s complete, I plan to bring the work back to be displayed in the community.
Below are a selection of Matt Eich’s Instagrams of Greenwood.
Top: Greenwood, Mississippi, 1963. After giving a concert in a cotton field, Bob Dylan plays on the back porch of the S.N.C.C. office. Photograph by Danny Lyon.