Throughout the spring 2015 semester, University of Alabama at Birmingham students from Photography in the South course have studied photographs made in and about the South. The curriculum has led students from the classroom to the field and from the library to the Birmingham Museum of Art’s permanent collection in search of an understanding of the South and the complex ways in which it has been pictorially represented through fine art and documentary photographic practices. The photographs presented here are certainly strange, and they are definitely true – whether by accident or by grace.  Or perhaps these artists have the “wise blood,” and through their shared secrets of the South we gain better understanding of a region where a dark past of injustice and poverty perpetually impends upon the present and bears on the future.