“Portraits in Place,” the photography exhibition by University of Mississippi Associate Professor of Journalism Mark Dolan, debuted with an opening reception on Thursday, Feb. 19 in Barnard Observatory. The display features numerous black-and-white portraits, documenting Dolan’s journey across the South to pinpoint the deep connection between people and their homes.
“All of the people in the project are people who exhibit or show a strong tie to place — people for whom place is everything,” Dolan said. “If you separated them from their roots, from where they stand, from where they live, from where they’ve worked, from where they sleep, from where they dream, it would almost be as if they cease to exist.”
Each portrait connects to an oral history of a Southerner.
“It’s 24 photographs out of a project that consisted of 50 photographs,” Dolan said. “They’re 50 oral histories, narrative profiles of people from across the South that I interviewed across 23,000 miles of road journey.”
The project began with his desire for conversation and connection with people and an urge to understand them on a deeper level.
“The idea for the project was to talk to people in person, to value their front porch, their living room,” Dolan said. “All the interviews took place in homes, or in backyards, with a few exceptions where people worked, which was like their home.”
Dolan said he often got to know interviewees deeply and developed many friendships throughout his journey.
“In many instances, I would stay like a day in that person’s house,” Dolan said. “In some cases, I spend a weekend, or I’d have a hard time getting away and people said, ‘Can you just stay for the week?’ or something like that.”
Dolan’s ultimate goal was to memorialize people’s connection with their home or workplace and how it shaped who they are.
“The idea was to honor people’s memories and their stories and their life in a place,” Dolan said. “And at the same time, to engage in conversation with people.”
During the reception, Dolan spoke of his first inspiration for the project — long road trips with his mother.
“It began in 2019, after having taken my mother on a lot of road trips around the South,” Dolan said. “As we would go, I would just create these voice memos and create all the history recordings of those.”
While the project began with immediate family, it soon grew and expanded to include other people in Dolan’s life.
“It started to sort of spread in a sense, to colleagues and to relatives of students whom I had taught,” Dolan said. “It started to sort of snowball and branch out from there until it started to be something that involved the whole South.”
The exhibition captured the diversity of the portraits, unified with the overarching theme of personhood shaped by place.
“Place defines us, and that’s sort of the premise of the project,” Dolan said. “You are the place and the place is you. It’s disarmingly simple in a way, but it opens a lot to think about.”
