Rural black underclass homes - indoor

As a foreigner brought up to see America as a land of affluence it was a shock for me to see the living conditions of blacks in the South. I saw hundreds of thousands live in homes inferior to those we lived in in the middle ages in Denmark - homes I in my childhood had only seen in our open air museums. I was even more shocked that nobody were photographing these inhuman rotten shacks. Many of them were in very remote areas where it was hard to hitchhike. But gradually I learned that many of the worst were actually hidden away "across the tracks" on the muddy back roads of the small southern towns - out of sight for the white racism which both condoned and rationalized their fitness for "niggers." I had not imagined in the 70's that they would still be around 35 years later. Still I regret that I didn't spend more time photographing the "romantic" old woodden ones then since many gradually burned down in the common stove fires and were replaced by mass produced plastic trailers also designed for the poor. So although the poverty and sense of ostracism is the same today, these 17 pages of photos of life in rural shacks shows a period of American history which is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by less photogenic "projects" and trailers.