Water Valley in Mississippi is a town of about 3,000 people. People move there or stay there because they fall in love with the gothic revival Victorian houses, which exist in various states of renovation or decay. One of those people was photographer Carolyn Drake, who settled in Water Valley a few years ago, having returned from a decade of travelling in Russia and Asia, including a spell living and photographing in Uighur villages on the edge of the Taklamakan desert.
Drake spent two years in Water Valley hardly picking up her camera. She wasn’t sure how to photograph the place without it looking like a New Yorker’s view of “the south”. It was only after she became part of a knitting circle, an insider, sitting on her friend Katharine’s porch drinking IPA, stitching rugs, listening to true crime podcasts, that she found a way to do that. Knit Club, her strange and powerful book of photographs of the women of Water Valley, is the result.
This picture, in which her fellow knitters and quilters are obscured by flowers, captures one of the themes of her book, an extreme playfulness with ideas of motherhood and femininity – ideas she had tended “to run away from with her camera”. In the collaborative community of the knit club she began to question why she resisted those ideas. Some of her photographs are taken in abandoned houses, some in dusky woodland; several suggest mysterious sisterly ritual. In most, Drake has suggested, the women’s faces are obscured to avoid replicating the male gaze. There are no captions, but brief fragments of quotation in the book, from the knitters. Katharine, for example, says: “I live right in the middle of town, so everybody sees us sitting out here. A couple of my friends’ ex-husbands, they just hate it. They’re like: ‘These chicks are up to no good.’ Maybe they’re right.”
