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DIIV - Follow

Photography tells one story of American roots, and the way that it is preserved and displayed will tell another side of that story. Both stories deal with the value of content. One is from the beginning, and the other is for the future. The BCAH is now charged with the preservation of Susan’s photography. Because the center is neither strictly a museum nor strictly an archive, there is constant confusion about what to do with some of the remarkable materials housed there. I believed her photography could combine blues music and public history, creating a cultural narrative of the Austin blues scene... To archive these photographs was not enough. They needed an exhibition that drew on the lore of Austin cultural history and told the often lesser known story of musicians who had paid their dues for years before getting the recognition they deserved... The project is ongoing, and includes a photography exhibit, a small book of photos, and a digital oral history project that includes interviews with musicians and patrons. Hopefully, through its fruition, public history will breed cultural tourism in the form of a revised Austin music narrative. 

In many ways, Austin music tourism is focused more on promoting music than on combining music and history, and as a result, the back story often gets left out. The goal of the Susan Antone Photography Exhibit is to join history with popular culture, bringing together an academic institution and a nightclub in order to fill in some blanks that get left out of the master narrative. The goal of Austin music tourism will never promote the blues the way that Mississippi does because Austin is not just about the blues. But the city could take a lesson from the efforts going on to embrace history and culture across the Mississippi Delta in how to harness the two without dismissing either one.


DIIV - Follow
  • Written by: Zachary Cole Smith
  • Genre: Rock, Shoegaze
  • Released: Jun 26, 2012


"Zachary Cole Smith formed DIIV in 2011 as a forum for his own songs. He enlisted childhood friend Andrew Bailey on guitar, bassist Devin Ruben Perez, and drummer Colby Hewitt as his live band."

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Location: United States

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