Rotan Switch Video
Filmed and Directed by Lisa McCord and Chris Wooden

Rotan Switch

1978 - present

Rotan Switch documents life on my grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan, which takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. 

I was twenty-one years old when I began photographing Rotan Switch. This project spans forty-five years, from 1978 to present day, following five generations of a community. I developed close relationships with the people who worked on the farm. They welcomed me into their homes, we’d share fried chicken and black-eyed peas, meet at the cafe where they relaxed at the end of a hard work week, and at church on Sundays we’d sing “Sweet Jesus, Carry Me Home”. 

I have lived in many places, but my idea of home remains firmly rooted in the Arkansas land and people. While the photographs I made at Rotan are explorations of this idea, I’m acutely aware that the place I call home is not perfect. 

These photographs are complicated; they exist in the context of the socioeconomic structures of the rural South. Although the subjects are family to me, as a white photographer and the granddaughter of a landowner, my photographs of the Black community implicate my own role in reinforcing these power structures. In a community in which most people spend their time working or caring for children, my ability to observe and document in itself has been a position of privilege. 

The images are coupled with my own memories, as well as, reflections by the people in the photographs. These images are a record of my story of Rotan and the Arkansas Delta, a story that is specific to my and my family’s role in a place where inequities exist to this day. I have done my best to acknowledge this complicated history.