The Nickel Boys director asks how photography can liberate the American South from its past
Sunlight, the sound of insects. The fruit of an orange tree comes into focus as the camera pans down to a hand playing with leaves in the grass. ‘Elwood!’ calls a voice from the distance. The idyllic opening scene of Nickel Boys (2024), RaMell Ross’s magisterial adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, pointedly sets up its central formal conceit – a sustained first-person point-of-view – from within a moment of luxurious slumber. This dozily oneiric beginning might seem an unlikely start to a film whose horrors accumulate breathlessly. The first-person perspective, which begins with Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and later shifts to his friend Turner (Brandon Wilson), only to later move elastically between the two, provides us with the visual orientation to navigate the Nickel Academy, an abusive reform school in 1960s Jim Crow era Florida, where Elwood is sent for a crime he did not commit. For his portrayal of the Nickel, which is based on a notorious, real-life institution (the Dozier School for Boys) where the systemic abuse and murder of Black students was covered up for many years, Ross brings bucolic elements to an interminable hell. This is a place where the segregation of Black and white students is visible on arrival and where violence is doled out and threatened, landing Black students in hospital or dead. Elwood and Turner escape by sitting under trees or lounging behind sheds: their friendship is a ballast; so too is the beauty of nature and their shared inner world.
With Nickel Boys, Ross puts his audience in the position of viscerally experiencing what has for so long been buried, through a POV that powerfully bifurcates to reveal what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the ‘double-consciousness’ that Black people experience in a racist world. But Ross’s photographic portraiture, much of which is gathered here in his first monograph Spell/Time/Practice/American/Body, adopts a radically different strategy: one of concealment and ambiguity rather than embodied witnessing. In the portrait Shaquan (2013), a woman turns back to look at us, only we can’t register her expression as her gaze is obscured by a tree branch. In Yellow (2013), we cannot see the young girl’s face at all, only a colourful dress peeking out from behind a flower bush. This is a portrait of a young girl lost in a private moment of play, though its grandiose setting remains ominous. By rejecting the direct gaze of traditional portraiture, Ross’s photographs demand an alternative mode of engagement. The eye has to read between the lines. The very fact of being unknowable, Ross told Jason Fox in World Records Journal in a 2023 interview, is a privilege not always granted to African-American photography, which is often put in the position of “educating,” “humanising” or standing for a community. His subjects are instead permitted to wander at the edges of the frame or hang out in the background of a shot, retaining their own internal mysteries. And so, the lens swings back on us. What are we expecting to have explained? What are we wanting to find here?
Across five chapters, Spell/Time/Practice/American/Body spans a creative practice that extends well beyond film into photography, writing, and installation and performance art. I’m struck by how much the book in my hands resembles a legal report, down to the metallic ring binder, matte-brown cover and authoritative sense of heft. This seems intentional, with the legal framework appealed to in the book’s opening manifesto, ‘Slangless’ (2013), which is presented as a case study. The text concerns the act of photographing the American South, an area with a deeply vexed relationship to Black history and its attendant forms of image-making. Many of the great American photographers (like Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans) have mythologised the region by crafting humanist portraits or ethnographic documentation of rural Southern communities. These portraits are often of the white working-class, which a 2020 essay in The Atlantic tellingly called the ‘whitewashing’ of the Great Depression. The challenge presented to Ross is clear: to create a new body of images of this mythic-but-always-actual place while avoiding the familiar traps of cliché, nostalgia or extractive reportage. How do you photograph the American South with the purpose of liberation in mind?
While the book’s format evokes the judicial, its images refute how photography has been used to categorise or incriminate Black people in America and beyond. Ross, who is African American but not from the South, explores this tension in his first feature, the Oscar-nominated documentary, Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2018). An expansive, experimental portrait of young people in the Alabama Black Belt, Hale County was filmed across five years, during which time Ross embedded himself in the community and became friends with Daniel and Quincy, whose lives we follow in all its rhythms and associative poetry. ‘How do we not frame someone?’ asks one of film’s intertitles, invoking the frame’s legal and photographic double meaning. The film answers this by refuting the concrete and the declarative, instead offering an impression of the American South that makes a case for all things ordinary, for the brilliant banal.
And what could be more banal than an afternoon nap? Sleep is what many of Ross’s photographic subjects do; they lounge, luxuriate, stretch out and slump. Ross describes this strategy of recumbency – the act of lying low to the ground – as ‘a tiny act of refusal on the part of myself, and on the part of those in front of the camera to kind of give themselves over to the viewer for consumption.’ Figures have their backs to us in repose, their eyes are shaded from the sun. We perceive them vaguely, in long shot; lost to a dust cloud or dwarfed by the magnitude of a tree.
The South has often materialised as if in past-evoking shorthand: cotton-picking, string guitar, slavery and spirituals. Ross’s photography does not do away with stereotype completely but rather plays on past assumptions, riffing on recognisable subject matter. Timeless symbols of Southern Americana like chapels, a school bus and a stately home belie their shiny facades, invoking a painful recent history of violence, segregation and colonialism. In Giving Tree (2012), a young woman hangs off a branch, her eyes closed and her arms suspended: a disturbing image that summons up the unfathomable horrors of lynching. Southern Gothic, white nationalism, working-class grit: our expectations of the American South – as the cradle of the worst, and also some of the best, of American culture – inform what we read into these images. It’s our own cultural baggage and predisposed assumptions that we each bring to the page, even from the vantage point of the UK, a country similarly steeped in its own nationalist myth-making.
The centrepiece of this book is the remarkable mixed-media project Return to Origin (2021). In 1849, an enslaved African-American man called Henry Brown freighted himself to freedom in a box. Ross recreated this trajectory in 2021, secretly posting himself from Rhode Island to Hale County in an open-air box, while recording the fifty-nine-hour trip. During the journey, he starts writing his Black Dictionary (RaMell’s Dictionary, 2021), adding the word ‘black’ before every word in a children’s dictionary and scrawling the text on the inside of the box. I am reminded again of Nickel Boys and its own fraught freedom-journeys. Early on in the film, footage of a changing sky appears in time-lapse, filmed from the perspective of a moving open box. The footage repeats much later on. The first time it appears, it signals the moment that Elwood’s POV splits into Turner’s, and in the second, it is a journey of escape, like the one taken by Henry Brown, and the one recreated by RaMell Ross. An entry in Ross’s Black Dictionary, excerpted in this book, rings out clearly. ‘Black abandon: surrender, to give up control or influence of another person or agent.’ Another word for napping. Another word for freedom.
Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body by RaMell Ross is out now with MACK. Nickel Boys is in cinemas now
Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a film scholar, arts critic and programmer
