Matt White
‘TODAY’S LUNCH’: FOX News sends out a transmission next to the daily specials board in White’s “Rest Haven Diner, Clarksdale, Mississippi.”

Some photographs are worth revering because they imply a sense of motion. Matt White’s photographs are worth revering because they imply a pause. It might be a photo of his grandmother Ora Faye, sporting pearl earrings, a beauty-shop-fresh ’do and the gentlest of blue eyes. It might be the drum line for the Natchez Bulldogs, marching in blue and gold for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in southern Mississippi. It might be a dilapidated brick wall, on the verge of collapsing inward in an ill-fated communion of new kudzu leaf and old mortar. Whatever’s in front of his camera, White doesn’t “capture” a subject, to use a tired phrase, so much as he sits with it for a standstill of a moment, considers it, and then asks us to do the same. We asked White — photographer, documentarian and co-owner of the White Water Tavern — to let us showcase some of the work that earned him the “Best Photographer” spot in this year’s Best of Arkansas survey, so you can see for yourself.

Matt White
LENS AND LIGHT: White’s work plays with perspective, as in “Phillips County Cross”
Matt White
“Martin Luther King Day, Natchez, Mississippi”
Matt White
“Portrait of Ora Faye”
Matt White
‘BRYANT’S GROCERY, MONEY, MISSISSIPPI’: White turns his lens to the Leflore County spot that sparked the murder of Emmett Till.

Matt White

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