Liberty Theater

Book excerpt: "Liberty Theater by Rosalind Fox Solomon brings together her photographs made in the Southern United States from the 1970s to 1990s, never before published together as a group. Solomon's images depict a complex terrain of social and emotional issues inherited over generations: a world of class and gender divisions, implied and overt racism, competing notions of liberty, and lurking violence. Journeying through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South California, Solomon draws attention to cultural idiosyncrasies, paradoxes and theatrical displays: a Daughter of the Confederacy sits in costume with a china doll from her collection; a dead tree stump, fenced and suspended with wires is elevated to the status of a Civil War monument; African American boys examine a vitrine of guns as two white police manikins loom behind them. Poised between act and re-enactment, the animate and the inanimate, Solomon's images reveal how history becomes a vernacular performance and identity a form of theatre.--