‘The beginning of Black liberation’: photographs tell the real story of the Mississippi Delta

On a hot afternoon in June, four people stood in the lobby of Travelers Hotel off Third Street in Clarksdale, Mississippi, each taking in the images that lined its walls. The photographs are part of Soil, an exhibition depicting Black farmers in the Mississippi Delta.

The town’s art and culture district, where Travelers Hotel is located, serves as a living monument to the region’s history – with signs, murals and banners every few feet that immortalize famous current and former residents, such as Early Wright, the first Black disc jockey in Mississippi, and the musicians Leo Welch and “Kingfish” Ingram. If Mississippi is known as the birthplace of America’s music, Clarksdale is the home of the blues.

Created in the Mississippi Delta, which stretches from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, the blues is a genre inextricably linked to the back-breaking work of Black farmers, descendants of enslaved people, who created a new form of music as they toiled. The exhibit seeks to highlight that connection and pay homage to the continuing legacy of those farmers. The photographs, shot by the Jackson-born photographer Justin Hardiman, and co-curated by his fellow Jacksonian Adrienne Domnick, counter dominant narratives about Black life and Black farmers in the delta, showing the pride, history and dignity of their labor.

Related: Me and the devil: Mississippi’s legendary blues festival – in pictures

In one of the images, The Harvest, the essence of the blues comes to life: Jeremy Miller, a young farmer clad in a blue T-shirt and bluejeans, holds a mesh sack full of recently harvested greens. He stands firmly planted in rows of collard greens with the sun glistening on his skin. Like generations of Black farmers before him, Miller reaped the greens himself – through Hardiman’s lens, he holds his abundant yield as evidence of the continuation of that work.

“When people think about Mississippi, they never center the Black people of Mississippi,” Hardiman said. “My work is about centering us, making the story about us. Don’t forget about us.”

‘Folks talk about us, but not necessarily to us’

In the antebellum period, the Mississippi Delta was one of the richest regions in the country, due to wealth generated by enslaved people on cotton plantations. But while the music that accompanied their labor is celebrated throughout the region and world today, the modern Black farmers whose ancestors fueled the area’s economy are largely rendered anonymous.

Since slavery and the years after reconstruction, art, news and other media depicting Black Deltans have remained relatively consistent: they are often faceless , out-of-focus Black bodies; anonymous figures in large, white fields . But in Soil, Black farmers are the focal point.

One exhibit photo, The Fruits of Our Labor, depicts three men and one woman in a field with a church visible in the far distance. The farmers’ gaze is firm and proud; they appear to be staring back at the viewer. The group represents three generations of Jonestown, Mississippi, natives, standing on land owned by the Swan Lake Association, founded in 1870, as a partnership among multiple Black churches in the delta. The churches purchased more than 600 acres (243 hectares) of land together, in hopes that people who moved out of the state would have land whenever they came home.

“Justin was really adamant [about] focusing on the people, and that speaks directly to what the work is about: documenting and immortalizing Black folks in the south,” said Jasmine Williams, whose organization ’Sipp Talk Media produced the exhibition. “Folks talk about us, but not necessarily to us. I think it gave us an opportunity to show what the alternative narrative of Mississippi could look like outside of what mainstream media tells us Mississippi is.”

‘This is about being one with our ancestors’

At the opening event, farmers were able to sell some of their produce to attendees as they explored the exhibit. By marrying the exhibition to the land, the collaborators erased a distance that often exists between the subject and the work produced.

“It was really important for folks who were a part of the photoshoot to have it in their backyard,” said Tyler Yarbrough, a manager at Rootswell, a group working to “ shift the paradigm of food apartheid”. “Having the exhibition in the town gave the farmers a chance to see the power in their work … and also to have more buy-in on what we’re trying to do.”

Changing the narratives around Mississippi and the delta is key to all of the partners behind Soil. For his part, Hardiman said he thinks about soil and the delta as “the genesis”.

“That’s the beginning of all Black liberation,” Hardiman said. “It’s a lot of history in the delta that’s not talked about and it’s a lot of stories not being told from people who look like us, so it’s just me doing my part in trying to contribute something to the world and leave something behind.”

Soil creates a record of both the seasoned Black farmers who have worked the land for decades and the younger generations who are beginning to come into their own.

Bennie Brown, a farmer who’s photographed in The Fruits of Our Labor, is continuing the legacy started by the Swan Lake Association, for instance. As president of the group, Brown has created an incubator to train the next generation of Black farmers.

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Robbie Pollard became a farmer after a long career in IT. Pollard, who created the healthy food initiative Happy Food Project , is pictured in a photo called Farmer’s Market – he sits on the back of a bus that he plans to turn into a mobile farmers’ market and food truck.

And in Sowing Seeds, Robert Miller II is pictured with his arm wrapped around his son, while standing on the 1,400-acre Bland Family Farm, which has been owned by four generations of Black farmers.

These photographs represent not only the delta’s present, but also the future that Rootswell and other community advocates are building. As the exhibit’s statement reads: “It is a testament to the enduring legacy of Black farmers whose labor sustains not only their communities but also the very fabric of Mississippi.”