(because great photographers have already done them and because the “symbolism” or “meaning” is now trite. Only the most sensitive photographers can still succeed with these subjects):

1. Snake handlers
2. Cock fights
3. African-Americans being baptized in muddy rivers
4. African-Americans, who do manual labor (on cars or farms, etc.), in dirty work clothes
5. Quaint sings (of a religious or barbeque or truckstop variety, usually)
6. Elvis impersonators (esp. if they are children or foreign or midgets)
7. Abandoned jalopies from the 1940s, overgrown with weeds; abandoned cabins or houses in the state of crumbling
8. Old Southern fellers squattin’, spittin’, pickin’, or carvin’ on the town square
9. The Confederate flag juxtaposed with something modern
10. Contemporary members of the KKK, usually obese, in robes, hooded or not hooded
11. Graveyards, esp. weeded-over graveyards
12. Contemporary black prisoners wearing prison stripes and working in a cotton field
13. Old Southerners on porches
14. Poor people washing their clothes or looking unhappy or poor or like they just stepped out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

—excerpted from “Soft and Tender Creatures” by J.B. Slogan, in the Fall 2005 Oxford American