Porch Dogs
By Nell Dickerson
Hardcover, 112 pages
$29.95 (John F. Blair, Publisher)
In the South, the porch has always been much more than a portal to the indoors; it’s the stage for a spectrum of life unique to the region’s climate and culture. Dickerson, a photographer who grew up in the Mississippi Delta and now makes Memphis, Tenn., home, recalls a childhood sleeping outside on porches and remembers the porch as the place where women shelled peas and sewed, men played checkers, and neighbors stopped by to visit. Her handsome collection of more than 60 color portraits of pooches throughout the South, all perched on porches (or near porches) in states of rest and repose, is about as doggone, down-home, summertime charming as a book can be.
