Join fine art photographer Keith Dotson on a photographic exploration of the abandoned places in this fascinating Delta city where blues music got its start
In this video, we visit and make photographs in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the so-called birthplace of blues music. Many of the greatest blues musicians were born in Clarksdale or started their careers there.
Clarksdale helped spawn one of America’s greatest and most fundamental genres of music. If you think about it, blues music is the root of most modern styles of music — of course everybody knows rock and roll was based on the blues — but you may not realize that even country music was influenced by blues musicians.
Our first stop is the abandoned Clarksdale High School. One of the unique aspects of this high school is that it had a cemetery on its school yard. In this video, we just take a quick look at this incredible building, but I previously made a full video of Clarksdale High School with some history of the school and a detailed look at the headstones in the cemetery. See that video below.
After posting the original video about Clarksdale High School, I heard from a lot of people who went to school there. While this seems like a rather creepy — if beautiful — old ruin, for them, it’s a beloved place of happy memories. There has been a lot of expression of sadness to see it in such a dire state of neglect.
Black and white photographs from Clarksdale and vicinity
These photographs are available as museum-quality fine art black and white prints on baryta surface art paper. Click the photograph to go to my main e-commerce site.
This abandoned storefront is seen briefly in the video above, but you can see a more thorough exploration of it in the video below, including some peeks inside.
See all my photographs of the Mississippi Delta here.
Thanks for reading
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~ Keith