A New Portrait From Alabama
A quick preview before a longer preview
Good photos, like good ideas, need a gestation period. My long-term projects often require me to step away from the work for a good while before it is brought into the world. But I am now peeking back into my folder of American Gingers. This is an early preview of that project for paid subscribers. I will release new Gingers work from the US more widely in due course.
Each interview I made with the sitters requires transcription and editing for sense and concision. And choosing images takes longer than you might imagine. But luckily there is a deadline to spur me on.
In 2026, I aim to release a new book: Gingers of America. I don’t know how exactly but I have the portraits.
For now, here is a sneak peek of a wonderful couple of people I met in Alabama.
Tracey and Alannah Rae White, Alabama
Tracey: We are from here in Birmingham, Alabama. Alannah is my granddaughter. I think the nurse’s first statement about her was, “Oh my, her hair’s blonde,” because it did look blonde initially. And that was a little shock. Mostly our family is African American. My nieces, my brother’s girls, have different moms, but both nieces have red hair. And they each have a baby boy with red hair.
So I started looking into our ancestry. It’s African, a small amount of Irish, and a very minute amount of Indonesian. It was hard to trace my father’s side, which I think is where the red hair comes from. My grandmother on my father’s side had red hair. Everybody we knew of was from the South. I’ve been in Alabama all my life and before that the family were in different states, but mostly Alabama.
Alannah: Mom’s hair used to be brown but then she put something in it and it got darker and darker and darker.
Tracey: We know her dad is from Alabama, but not here in Birmingham. He’s Caucasian and his hair is brown. I did see an older picture of him before he cut his beard, and I thought it had a little red in it.
Growing up, my daughter’s hair was a kind of sandy-looking color: you would think it was dirty, but it wasn’t. That was just the color it was, and now it’s black. She’s working a lot so I just take care of Alannah most of the time anyway. I take her tumbling, to you know, piano, whatever she’s doing. Alabama has a lot of Southern history, some good, some bad, but also a lot of hospitality, a lot of good home-cooked Southern food, and mostly polite people.
More soon!