Photo essay from the Arkansas Ozarks wins WaPo contest

Here's a link to Terra Fondriest's photo essay in the Washington Post, which chose her submission as one of two prize winners in a contest co-sponsored by Visura.  Fondriest's photos are from Searcy County,  Arkansas, population 8195, and some are from a community in that county called Oxley. 

That's about 40 miles from where I grew up in neighboring Newton County, just to the west.  Searcy and Newton counties are Arkansas's only persistent poverty counties (meaning high poverty rate for each of the last four decennial censuses) that are essentially all white.  The state's other persistent poverty counties have significant African American populations and are in the Mississippi Delta area.

Washington Post photo editor Kenneth Dickerman writes: 

I recognize my own extended family in these photos, and I’m sure many others will, too. Fondriest’s work is a poetic look at how most of us put one foot in front of the other and move forward. It shows that daily life is just as profound and important as any big news event.

Fondriest had this to say about her work: 

One drive on a dirt road through the Ozark hills and you’ll get a taste of this region’s natural features. You’ll cross creeks in your vehicle, stopping in the middle to listen to the water flow, and then head back up the hill on the wash-boarded road. You’ll pass vistas of seemingly endless hills dotted with cattle pastures. You’ll see wild turkeys dash across the road in front of you on their way to the acorns and hickory nuts that are in the forest on the other side. If your windows are open, you might hear waterfalls cascading down the drainages after a hard rain, or the interior might fill with dust and the smell of oak leaves burning during a dry spell. You might meet a truck coming at you on the narrow road and see how it pulls off onto the edge of the woods to let you pass. You’ll begin to collect moments that are unique to this part of the country. And if it so happens that you decide to put roots down and call these hills home, you might start to develop a relationship with certain parts of the creek or different bends in the road. You might start to become familiar with the people nestled in the hills that have been here for generations and those who have arrived recently just like you. You might discover and become part of the cadence of everyday life here.

Nice.  I admit that I still have relationships with certain stretches of creeks and particular bends in the road in Newton County--though I left more than three decades ago. Here, here, here, here and here are some of my more photo-centric posts about the place in the dozen years I've been writing this blog. 

P.S.  According to the map published in this New York Times Upshot analysis, Searcy County, Arkansas is one of just three Arkansas counties where the economy was doing worse in 2019 than in 2016 by three major metrics: fewer jobs, lower inflation-adjusted average wages and a higher unemployment rate.  Only two other Arkansas counties have declined on all three metrics, though many declined on two of the three.