I currently have on-line some photos from past contract folklife fieldwork in Kent County, Maryland, Lexington County, South Carolina, and from the South Carolina Heritage Corridor Region II (Abbeville, Greenwood, McCormick and Edgefield Counties). This gallery is a work in progress, so please bear with me. The collections are posted in gallery form (courtesy an excellent shareware program from Germany called Graphic Converter), but captions are incomplete or non-existent until I can get to them. I'd be glad to correspond by e-mail with anyone who has questions about any particular image or set of images.
The Kent County photos, in black and white, are from a special homecoming celebration at Mt. Olive AME Church. Part of the celebration was the inclusion of a "singing and praying band" from other sections of Maryland. The ancient tradition of the "singing and praying band" is a little-studied phenomenon of the Black church in Maryland and parts of Delaware, with striking resemblance to the ring-shouts of the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands. An old classmate from Penn named Jonathan David is the only person I know who has written extensively about the subject, and is working on a book, I understand.
Lexington County images
The photos from Lexington County (and environs) are from survey fieldwork in 2001-2002 in which I was to identify and document potential partners for folk-arts-in-the-schools programs there. The photos include local Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrations; ethnic shops along Decker Boulevard in Columbia; Kathak dance lessons at the Hindu Cultural Center; Navratri (Hindu) celebrations including garba and garba ras dance, and aarti (hymns and prayers); tortilla making; and some other "stuff." (I also did a long interview with two Iranian Ba'hai musicians, but did not, alas take any photos.)
The 206 images here are from survey fieldwork in the Corridor in 1999-2001. These images were to have gone on an on-line exhibit at the South Carolina Traditional Arts Network site, and I started to put together little essays for a dozen categories. I think SCTAN ran out of money before the project was completed; only a few of the categories, and only a couple of my favorites, made it to the website. Here they all are:
In the absence of captions, the best way to get what the images are about--or where my head was at when I was taking them--is to download the South Carolina Heritage Corridor Region II Summary Report in pdf format. The photos look better here in the gallery, though, and there're more of them.
Again, these are works in progress; please email me with questions.
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