With Signs Following: Photographs from the Southern Religious Roadside.
“Jesus Saves.” “Get Right With God.” “You Need Jesus.” If you’ve ever seen any of these phrases painted on a placard tacked to a tree, emblazoned in spray paint under a bridge, or arranged in black letters on a church sign, you’re already familiar with the subject matter of photographer Joe York’s new book With Signs Following: Photographs from the Southern Religious Roadside.
York, who produces and directs films for the Center for Documentary Projects at in the Division of Outreach, has been fascinated by road signs since his childhood in Alabama. He first began documenting road signs as a graduate student working towards his thesis in the University’s Southern Studies program. What makes York’s photographs compelling is his eye for composing indelible images.
York’s black-and-white photographs feature everything from relatively hi-tech neon crosses in store windows to the most crudely carved and painted signs. Traveling to virtually every state in the Southeast, York says that through his journey, he came to find that the provocative signs were done not out of spiritual passion as he had originally thought, but rather from a business angle—the signs are in fact put there to “sell Jesus” to the masses.
As renowned University of Mississippi Southern Studies professor and historian Charles Reagan Wilson writes in the book’s introduction: “Joe York captures a Southern religious aesthetic that characterizes the roadsides of the region from the Upper South hill country to north Florida and on through the Deep South and into the piney woods of eastern Texas.”
Joe York will be signing copies of his book at Southside Gallery on Thursday August 30, 2007, at 6 p.m. With Signs Following: Photographs from the Southern Religious Roadside is available from University Press of Mississippi.
