Kotz Exhibition & Book Signing

Photographer Jack Kotz will be in Oxford during the 29th Faulkner Conference to meet guests at a reception for his exhibition Ms. Booth’s Garden and to sign copies of his book of exhibition photographs. The reception will be held at the Gammill Gallery in Barnard Observatory on Sunday, July 21, at 1:00 p.m. The booksigning will take place at Off Square Books on Monday, July 22, at 5:00 p.m.
In Ms. Booth’s Garden, published by the Mississippi Museum of Art and distributed by the University Press of Mississippi, Kotz provides an intimate portrait of his 96-year-old grandmother and her community. Kotz, who grew up around Washington, D.C., and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1980s began documenting his grandmother’s life during frequent visits to her hometown of Mathiston, Mississippi, and on pilgrimages to her birthplace in Hardin County, Tennessee. The book contains 110 color images made during the past 20 years.
Ms. Booth’s Garden shows Myrtle Booth at home, at church, in the bank and shops of “downtown” Mathiston, with her family and friends, enjoying the food they grow and eat, being a part of the natural and built environment around them. “These people lived simply and deliberately,” Kotz relates in his afterword to the book. “Gardens were not for fun, they were simple economics. Pet chickens and turkeys became food as time and need dictated. Life was about hard work, going to church, and being good to one another. It was also about strict disciplines, and adherence to the Bible.”
“What most interested me over time was simply my grandmother’s day-to-day life,” Kotz says. “I was constantly intrigued by the seemingly simple way she lived and the reverence with which she regarded the simplest of things and most commonplace of experiences.” In the process, the photographer learned that “people’s spirits are inextricable from the land they inhabit.” 
Author and NPR commentator Bailey White wrote the foreword to Ms. Booth’s Garden. “These photographs,” she says, “give so much that you have the feeling that if you just look hard enough you will be able to understand it all–the complexities of old, old friendships, the sweep of change, and the touching adjustments resourceful people make to accommodate it, the little eruptions of art that make up an enduring community.”
On display this summer at the Gammill Gallery are 46 photographs in the exhibition Ms. Booth’s Garden. For information about the exhibition, call 662-915-5993. For information about the Kotz booksigning, call Square Books at 662-236-2262.

Photograph: by Jack Kotz; Myrtle at Church: Ms. Booth plays the organ at First Baptist Church in Mathison, Mississippi.