The Documentary Arts Issue (guest edited by Tom Rankin) explores the privilege of perception, participatory archive, self-documentation, and, ultimately, self-preservation. From Hale County, Alabama, to Harlan County, Kentucky, to a Lao Buddhist temple in the mountains of North Carolina, Southern Cultures examines the many ways southerners create a record of themselves and their communities. Photo essays include Mormons, migrants, parades, and poetic collaborations, and personal meditations on ethnography and autobiography invite readers to reconsider the fundamentally permeable boundaries of art, fiction, document, and fact. What is real and what is true, and who gets to decide?