The Brooklyn Rail

French photographer Larry Niehues’s latest book, Mississippi Dream, stylizes the Mississippi Delta. Drawing on his background photographing alternative singer Kate Clover, The Black Keys, and Arctic Monkeys, Niehues tells the story of the Delta through blues culture. From 2020 through 2022, Niehues and musician Brooks Gallo, who contributed the text for this book, toured Clarksdale, Greenwood, Rosedale, and other Mississippi cities, capturing black-and-white panoramic shots of cotton fields, juke joints, and cookouts; exploring residents’ daily lives; and chronicling how blues culture persists, even throughout the pandemic. While Niehues’s choices bring dignity to a region known for being one of the poorest in the nation, he also overlooks the darker aspects of Mississippi’s history, creating a whitewashed version of blues.

A blues fan’s delight, Niehues’s book includes immersive photographs of renowned musicians’ gravestones, jam sessions, and dimly lit iconic clubs, such as Alligator Blues, Red’s, and Blue Front Cafe, owned by famed musician and proprietor Jimmy “Duck” Holmes (who is featured in a photo and wrote the foreword). After working on Nothing Has Changed: Portraits of the US, which shows small towns nationwide, Niehues returned to Blue Front Cafe, Mississippi's oldest surviving juke joint. The black-and-white shots, all presented without titles or dates, invite readers to imagine the empty juke joint in its heyday, teeming with patrons. Wear on the exterior shows in the cracked paint and worn wood, while a jukebox, guitars, and blues memorabilia line the interior wall. Added to the club after the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, the club’s large Coca-Cola sign recalls a time when state legislators could bar Black proprietors from selling Coca-Cola products. Between these music-themed pages, Niehues shows lush plantation fields, flooded streets, and flat highways, using a panoramic lens that creates a circular horizon to many of the images, adding dimension to a geographically flat region and inviting us into the landscapes. The curve in the colonial mansion set back from flooded grass adds more sky and negative space, making the massive abode foreboding. These photographs bolster those directly tied to music, illustrating the rich landscapes and providing context about the region's industries. But without additional photos focusing on Civil Rights history, namely addressing Emmett Till’s murder or Mississippi Freedom Summer, both of which are important narratives in blues and Mississippi history, glimpses of Mississippi’s tenuous past haunt the collection.

A sequence of river baptism photos shows tension between past and present. In the first, officiant Pastor Daley stands to the left side of the baptismal candidate. Socially distant onlookers dressed in their Sunday best witness this now-dying practice. Except for the surgical masks and iPhones, the service could have taken place in the 1930s—when African American people frequently performed baptisms by immersion at the banks of the Mississippi River. Out of this centuries-old tradition, which mixes Christian sacraments with West African spirituality, emerged songs like “Wade in the Water” or “Take Me to the Water,” well-known African-American spirituals, laying the foundation for blues music.

While Gallo makes mention of Mississippi’s “dark past,” the observations and images in the book stay at surface level. Photographs of Greenwood’s cotton fields could have created much-needed depth in Niehues’s narrative. In one wide-angle photograph, miles of shrubs dot across black branches and gray skies. A distant manufacturing structure replaces the Black laborers of Greenwood's prosperous years. In the following image, a sack trails down a Black man’s back as he leans over, pulling attention from the cotton he picks. The image is accompanied by a line of text on the opposite page: “Stories were born in these fields of cotton. In bloom, they act like a white, wavy ocean. The cold of winter washes these waves away, but no one listens to the stories that stay.” The text does not acknowledge this industry’s history with forced labor, which directly influenced the creation of Black popular music, missing an opportunity to honor not only the music but also the circumstances musicians like Muddy Waters or B.B. King endured.

Railroads have often signaled westward expansion, industrialization, and progress in United States lore. A melancholic photograph of railroad tracks shows thick clouds and dark shadows along the trees. The text across the page reads, “The Delta / Chicago connection may have been made possible by the sharing of their rails, which created strong similarities, but in the end, they’d never be the same,” suggesting the change in the blues from the Delta to Chicago was a dilution rather than the evolution of the genre. However, this portrayal ignores the links between the blues, railroads, and Great Migration or labor rights. Vague words and shallow lyricism inadequately address the violence and oppression “king cotton” inspired. Niehues glosses over the reason for blues staples like “Mississippi Goddam,” “Strange Fruit,” or “Why I Sing the Blues,” forcing a positive spin on this complicated and nuanced history. Attempting to skirt these narratives undermines his efforts to honor blues culture, which has always included stories of Black resistance to racism.

Although Niehues elevates the birthplace of US popular music by focusing on positive aspects of Delta culture, he neglects important characteristics of Mississippi culture, namely its roots in slavery and Civil Rights history. It’s a tactic many in the state employ to promote blues history as a tourist attraction. Trying to tell the story of blues without mentioning slavery or Mississippi’s Civil Rights history silences important realities instrumental in the genre’s creation. As the Mississippi state legislature limits discussion of this past, sugarcoating history supports those who would see Black people lose the many political and economic gains achieved since the end of the Civil War.