A Picture of an Old Country Store: The Construction of Folklore in Everyday Life

Main Article Content

Jon Kay

Abstract

This brief essay provides a close reading of a photograph taken by Frank Hohenberger, an Indiana photojournalist. The image is of the “Old Country Store” a store adjacent to the Nashville House, a tourist destination in Nashville, Indiana. Through tracing the history of this site and the photograph of it, I probe the constructed imagery of these two related artifacts with the aim of understanding a portion of their complex production. This paper is not a search for the authentic or a critique of the fake, but rather an exploration of the art of authentication as a complex social process embedded in particular historical and intercultural settings

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

Section
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Author Biography

Jon Kay, Indiana University

Director, Traditional Arts Indiana