Time Not Here, A: The Mississippi Delta
by: Mauskopf/Randall Kenan, Norman

Hardcover. Santa Fe, NM, Twin Palms Publishers, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 96 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean. like new copy in publisher's shrink-wrap. 78 full-page, black and white photographs. Limited to 3000 copies. Tight copy. A look at the black experience in late-20th-century America with powerful documentary images that will remain with the viewer long after the books are closed. Mauskopf presents a quiet collection of images made in one part of the South, the most isolated black communities of the Mississippi Delta, where time seems to have stopped in midcentury. The photographs are full of love, joy, and religious faith and are richly reproduced here as sheet-fed gravures. Mauskopf portrays the poorest Americans, who are nonetheless rich in family, church, and community bonds. He documents the unifying and dominant role of religion as well as the joys and sustenance provided by music, dance, romance, family life, and the land itself. These images capture a sense of place so powerfully that captions aren't necessary, though a brief and poetic essay by novelist Kenan nicely complements the photographs.