Rotan Switch

Rotan Switch documents life on my grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark – the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta.

Although it has not been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of racism and injustice. This project spans forty-five years, from 1978 to 2021, following five generations of a community.

These photographs are complicated; they exist in the context of the socioeconomic structures of the rural South. Although the subjects are family to me, as a white photographer and the granddaughter of a landowner, my photographs of the Black community implicate my own role in reinforcing these power structures.

Lisa McCord, “Lind and Mom at the Mississippi River”, 1985 - Courtesy of the artist and the gallery