Yellowhammer Press

The enemy of every Southern historian is sentimentality.  It and its louche cousin, romanticism, are seductive enough to derail any attempt at actual scholarship.  Few undertake to tell some fragment of the Southern narrative without being suckered in by marauding Union cavalrymen or the tale of some poor-but-proud widow scratching an existence from a rocky plot, etc, etc.  Such is the price of picking around the collapsing columns of porticoes and underneath sharecroppers’ shacks.

But there are rare successes. 

Silent in the Land, Chip Cooper’s collection of photographs documenting the  antebellum architecture of Alabama is as intimidating as it is delightful.  Visually, the book is a pleasure to behold.  The work is exceptionally well done, the colors are rich and the houses provoke a visceral reaction that may range from awe at the architectural splendor to distaste (I recognize the understatement) for the socio-economic conditions that made their construction and the class who built them possible.

Cooper, Director of Photography at the University of Alabama, along with architectural interpretations by Robert Gamble and essays by Harry Knopke, documents the ruins of a class and of a lifestyle with unabashed honesty.  The homes, some well maintained, others in lamentable states of delapidation, reflect either nostalgia or revulsion in the reader.  It’s precisely that semiotic weight that Silent in the Land evokes so masterfully.  Just don’t call it a coffee table book.