Exhibitions

"I wanted to photograph people," Birney Imes says, "and the juke joints were where they would congregrate. At some point I became interested in the places themselves - how these places had been transformed with found materials and a minimum of means into these amazing environments... Growing up in Mississippi in the fifties and sixties how could one not be obsessed or at least intensely curious about the relationships between whites and blacks here? Photography has been a way for me to look at these relationships, a way to seek understanding - to do something that was taboo for me as a child."

Bailey's Late Nite Spot, Rolling Fork, Mississippi is part of a series taken in the Mississippi Delta and published in Imes' Juke Joint Photographs in 1990. A shadowy figure can be seen entering the white-framed screen door to the right, having just climbed out of his pickup truck. Imes has a particular interest in color, as this study in blue and white - with a touch of red in the old sign - shows.

Imes studied history and art history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. After college he began as a staff photographer for the newspaper publisher by his father. He also began to explore his surroundings with a friend who liked to take pictures. Eventually Imes opened a commercial studio in Columbus, Mississippi, and continued his photographic explorations, often returning again and again to record the same people and places. He is essentially self-taught, and much of his work documents life among the rural blacks of the Delta and his own home country.