Flannery O'Connor's Georgia [Paperback]

BARBARA McKENZIE started photographing middle Georgia in 1967 when she moved to Athens, Georgia. She was an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Georgia and the author of several books, including Mary McCarthy, The Process of Fiction, and Fiction’s Journey.Succinct text from photographer Barbara McKenzie and a foreword by Robert Coles provide context for this moving collection of photographs of the middle Georgia Flannery O’Connor depicted in her fiction. Whether capturing highway signs proclaiming Christ or a restaurant five hundred yards up the road, the frenzied motions of persons seized by the Holy Spirit, or quiet folks, black and white, sitting on benches in town squares, these photographs portray strikingly and sympathetically the world O’Connor wrote about in her remarkable stories.Offered here is a wonderfully full sense of place in O’Connor’s life and fiction. The contrasts are remarkable, and the visual documentation of both worlds is eloquent.

Lovers of literature, admirers of artistry, explorers of Georgia will want this book.

McKenzie has created a strong sense of place in this collection of her photographs, which includes scenes of small-town Georgia life as well as pictures of O’Connor and her family. ‘The South blossoms with every kind of complication and contradiction,’ O’Connor once said. Many of them are well documented here.Whether capturing outrageous highway signs proclaiming Christ, the frenzied motions of persons seized by the Holy Spirit, or quiet folks, black and white, sitting on benches in town squares, these photographs portray strikingly and sympathetically the world O’Connor wrote about in her remarkable stories.