Lisa McCord is a fine art and documentary photographer from the Arkansas Delta who lives and works in Los Angeles and Arkansas. Her color and black & white photography focuses on her experiences of her family’s cotton farm, allowing the camera to take her places both in the past and present, creating photographs that explore her memories. McCord received her B.F.A from San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A from California Institute of the Arts. She also attended New York University, Le Contrejour, Paris, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. Her work has been shown in the U.S. and Internationally. McCord’s work is held in the collections of the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee.
Rotan Switch
In the 1980’s I began to document life on my grandparents’ cotton farm, Rotan, located on the Mississippi River in Northeastern Arkansas near Osceola. These vernacular images of every day life depict my family’s heritage and the agricultural life of the rural south and preserve a part of history that no longer exists–tenant farming.
As a young local photographer I was welcomed into homes, cafes and churches to capture images that would come to reflect the memories of my childhood. I would frequent the cafes to join the people who met to relax after a hard week of work. It felt natural to photograph these endeared friends doing ordinary things. We shared fried chicken and black-eyed peas cooked by Cully, my grandparents’ cook and beloved nanny. I spent many hours wandering the fields and local towns documenting the world around me.
To view more of Lisa’s work please visit her website.