Midway through a conversation with director and writer RaMell Ross, he recommends Scott L. Matthews's book, Capturing the South: Imagining America's Most Documented Region, an investigation into those who documented the historic American South (white and wealthy) and the narrative their photographs helped build that still exists today. After reading Matthews's compelling book, it's clear how influential Matthews's analysis has been on Ross's 2018 Academy Award-nominated documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and now, his first narrative film, Nickel Boys.
"In those images, the power dynamics were so fraught that [Black people] would never push back against someone taking an image," explains Ross. "Those photographs — and the practice of going out and photographing in the South — became the foundation for sociological field work that was then used for statistics to explore the differences in communities. [They] became the style of images that photographic fine art — social representation — is based on."
Through his research, Matthews uncovers the way in which the Black subjects of photos during the antebellum era, for example, fought back against an outsider's leering lens by quite literally saving face, making faces at the camera and purposely glowering straight down the lens.
"The people taking the photos believed that that was the real them, because they're outside of the community, and they're just coming for a moment," Ross says, musing on the tragic paradox of performance becoming embedded into Black culture.
As we said our goodbyes following our conversation in Toronto, Ross reminds me again to read Matthews's book, underscoring its significance to the filmmaker. The influence of Matthews on Ross is further exemplified in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, in which Ross, who currently resides in Alabama, documents the people who make up part of Alabama's Black Belt. Ross captures the Hale County community by holding the camera still, using close-up shots of moments passing by: the sweat beading down a basketball player, a woman's flyswatter tapping against her knee in wait.
Ross describes his filmmaking as participation. Unlike Walker Evans and William Christenberry before him, Ross doesn't document Hale County in an effort to romanticize it and paint its residents as "icons of poverty," as Matthews describes them — a visual language that would bring comfort to certain audiences. Instead, Ross, who was the local high school basketball coach when he first moved to the region, showcases the beauty of Hale County as an active member of the community.
In Nickel Boys, Ross continues his filmmaking-as-participation but on the opposite side of the coin: showcasing the raw devastation of an abusive reform school in Florida during the 1960s. Adapted from Colson Whitehead's novel of the same name, Nickel Boys takes inspiration from the Dozier School for Boys, a former reform school in operation for over 100 years where multiple unmarked graves were discovered in the 2010s, leading to an investigation into the physical and emotional abuse suffered by its students.
Similar to Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross adopts a first-person perspective in Nickel Boys, telling the story of two young African-American boys sent to the fictional Nickel Academy by only granting audiences fragments of an image to mimic the eye's natural cursory glances of the surrounding environment.
"Micro-looking processes that are human are what I was interested in. How can you use the camera to mime the way that we look? The way we look has almost been bastardized by film and photography," Ross observes, describing the seeming urgent need we have to find the most photographic or cinematic aspects of our world, a quality the director views as "not necessarily a good thing."
He adds, "It seemed to me [that] if you can figure out ways to approximate the way we wander with our heads, then the way that you're looking is more aligned with a sort of realism."
In Capturing the South, Matthews compares the writings of Martha Young, often considered to be one of Alabama's great writers, to the tropes of the plantation romance genre, popularized during the late 19th and early 20th century. Of Young, Matthews says her writing is situated "in a long line of white appropriation of Black expression as a means of racial representation."
By focusing his lens through the eyes of his two protagonists as opposed to on them, Ross ensures that his audience, regardless of race, empathize with his characters' reality, and thereby the historic reality. That our interpretation of events and the associated racially-charged issues aren't filtered through a sieve belonging to someone unfit to tell the story.
Ross describes his fictional and non-fictional works as being "in conversation" with one another — two films that exist visually and spiritually in tandem, anchored by a keen interest in Matthews's findings, specifically how the world's view of Black culture has in large part been formed by those outside the culture.
"Black folks aren't asked to make films about all white people," Ross notes. "But what would have happened if we did? What would white culture look like to them if we were doing that?"