Finding exoticism at home

Constantine Manos

Growing up in South Carolina in a Greek household was an experience that, in retrospect, had a definite influence on how I viewed the U.S. as I began photographing it later in life. From the beginning I felt that I was an outsider looking through a window at the society around me. That window later became the viewfinder of my Leica camera. As I grew up and attended school in the segregated South, I became more and more upset about the treatment of black people.

Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. 1952. Men praying in church. Constantine Manos/Magnum Photos

In college in my hometown, where all my schooling took place, I wrote the first anti-segregation editorials in the college newspaper - which led to telephoned threats to our house. While still in my teens, I photographed the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses in the countryside and went to Montgomery, Alabama to photograph the bus-boycott and the young Martin Luther King Jr. This was the beginning of my fascination with America and things American. As I saw more and more of the U. S. it became more exotic to me; I had no desire to go to India...

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