Hardcover with dust jacket
140 pages, 64 plates
7.75 x 8.75 in / 196.85 x 222.25 mm
With an essay by Zora J Murff
ISBN 978-1-942953-88-3
TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Out The E, a new monograph by artist Harlan Bozeman.
Elaine, Arkansas is a town carrying one of the most suppressed chapters in American history. In 1919, hundreds of Black sharecroppers organizing against peonage were massacred by white mobs aided by federal troops—events covered up, distorted, and only classified as lynchings in 2015. Today the town remains deeply abandoned and underfunded, a place where that history never fully receded.
During the Covid pandemic, Bozeman began making regular trips to Elaine, walking around, meeting people, and building relationships over time. Working with a large-format camera, he made portraits of the people who remain—children in particular—that are at once intimate and monumental. These are images of kids on basketball courts and empty streets, of neighbors posing in front of their homes, of young people standing in cemeteries with their backs to the camera. Bozeman returned again and again, bringing prints, bringing photography books, eventually running a summer photography camp for the kids he'd been photographing. The resulting images are interspersed throughout the book with historical photographs made in the aftermath of the 1919 massacre, pulling the past and present into uncomfortable proximity.
Bozeman's practice, as Zora J Murff writes in the accompanying essay, is one of study in the deepest sense—not scholarly consumption but the living alongside others that demolishes the ivory tower as a monopoly of knowledge. The book's title comes from local vernacular—"out the E" meaning out of Elaine—a phrase that captures the limited horizons the town's history has imposed on its people. Bozeman puts the spotlight on this easy-to-miss town not to romanticize or aestheticize its conditions, but to insist that its people and its history be seen clearly, and on their own terms. The book's dimensions deliberately echo those of Walker Evans's American Photographs—a quiet but pointed gesture toward a lineage of bearing witness to the underside of American life.