I was a Yankee from Philly moving to the south in 1974 with all of my pre-conceived notions about life here. Some of them were true. A small town just 35 miles north of Atlanta was still showing signs of segregation saying "Whites Only". Klan rallies were still occurring right outside of the city and the Confederate flag was still hanging at the capitol.

But Atlanta was in the beginning stages of change and eager to improve its image. When I started photographing here while in art school in 1978, I discovered two distinctly different places, one on the road to development and the other frozen in time. These offered some unique juxtapositions; the gentility and the cruelty, the beauty and the absurdity, the new and the old, the rich and the poor.

For the most part, these photos and ones in other documentaries on this site represent a southern life and history that no longer exists to any great extension in Atlanta, but can still be found in some of the smaller towns around it and in the southeast.