Reframing Appalachia: Foxfire ’s Rural Pedagogy

This article traces the conditions of the collective authorship of Foxfire – a publication produced by high school students in Appalachian northern Georgia starting in 1967. Working with family members and neighbours, students crafted a magazine that used photography and oral history to chronicle the lifeways of their rural mountain community. First printed as a modest local quarterly, the magazine would be adapted into a nationally bestselling book series, a Broadway play and a Hallmark Channel movie starring John Denver in the coming decades. Yet Foxfire was fundamentally a localised and collaborative inversion of photojournalistic practice. The lens of performance illuminates how the publication’s makers used the camera to translate embodied teaching and knowledge. Reimagining the dynamics of documentary photojournalism, students and community members employed photography as an adaptable tool to share a commons of local knowledge and revise perceptions of Appalachia by inviting bodily performances that emulated residents of the Southern mountains.