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Born in Périgord, France in 1931, Alain Desvergnes came to the Unites States in the sixties to teach photography at Ole Mississippi University. It was here that he read the works of William Faulkner, and fell in love with Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Inspired by Faulkner's words, Desvergnes sought to photograph Yoknapatawpha County, documenting both its beauty and its sorrow, which was visually unknown in Europe. As Faulkner wrote in Mosquitos:

You want to go into the streets of all the cities men live in. To look into all the darkened rooms in the world. Not with curiosity, not with dread nor doubt nor disapproval. But humbly, gently, as you would steal in to look at a sleeping child, not to disturb it.

With curiosity and silence, Desvergnes approached the people and the land, trying to visualize Faulkner's prose. Wandering the county for several months between 1963 - 65, he photographed cotton pickers, blues singers, Baptist preachers, baseball games, beauty pageants, local diners, colonial houses, wooden shacks, carnivals and the landscape which Faulkner described so vividly in many books, including The Sound and The Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and Mosquitos.

In one series of photographs, we see an aging woman clothed in a long dress and head turban, emerging among the tall fields of cotton weed. In other pieces we see a white man getting a haircut, while a young black boy shines his shoes; a blues singer passionately playing a guitar held together by tape; a young girl wearing a lace trimmed white dress standing at the entrance to a large white mansion which flies the Confederate flag; And the grave stone marking the resting place of William Faulkner, in Yoknapatawpha County.

Using both color and black and white, Desvergnes tells the story of generations of Americans living in the South during tumultuous times. Through a foreigners' eye, we feel the heat of the blazing sun, the cotton on our finger tips, and listen to the stories passed on from generation to generation -- stories about change and Southern culture. The result of his three year stay in Mississippi is Yoknapatawpha, published by Marval in 1990.