Pull into Palmetto, and it’s tempting to say it looks like a ghost town. The buildings in its two-block business district, just a half hour southwest of Atlanta’s noisy sprawl, are shuttered or boarded up. On a beautiful Sunday morning, the city center resembles more an abandoned movie set than a place that 5,000 residents call home. But slow down and look a little closer, and there are people downtown — portraits of people.
“I’ve only been here three years now,” said photographer Raymond McCrea Jones, “and as soon as I moved here, it was like: This place. What’s going on here?” Tall, lanky and mustachioed, Jones is a renowned Georgia artist and photojournalist who’s made the tiny historic town of Palmetto (established in 1852) the subject of his most recent artistic endeavor. “I was fascinated, and I think a lot of it has to do with my journalism background and being very curious about what makes a place,” he said. “Usually, it’s the people. So who are those people?”
Jones is the creative mind behind the Palmetto Portrait Project: fourteen new, black-and-white murals of Palmetto citizens recently installed at nine locations around town. These sensitively captured and larger-than-life “photo murals,” as Jones calls them, are designed not just to beautify and revitalize this small community at the southernmost tip of Fulton County (with some of Palmetto scooching over the Fulton-Coweta County line) but also to share its fascinating history.
“These pictures were made here in the town of the residents that live here,” said Jones pointing to his biggest portrait, visible from his studio window on Toombs Street and depicting a regal and elderly Black woman standing 10 feet high.
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
“This here is Betty Slaughter.” Decades ago, Slaughter would’ve strolled these sidewalks on her way to Bonita’s to get her hair done or over to Dr. Bullock’s second-story office. Seeing the faded, chipped facades and loose bricks of Palmetto today, it’s hard to imagine it ever had foot traffic.
Originally from North Carolina, Jones is a celebrated photographer and filmmaker who started his career at the New York Times and later transitioned back down south to Atlanta to focus more on independent work and his own projects. During COVID-19, he found a home in this sleepy community and relocated his family. Jones soon fell in love with this snapshot of small town American life — or at least the potential of what small town life could look like. Since he moved to Palmetto, the downtown has remained dormant. However, he believes that’s about to change.
Last November, Palmetto elected Teresa Thomas-Smith, who became simultaneously the first woman and Black mayor in the city’s 170-year history. Like many Southern towns, Palmetto has a segregated and, many residents believe, bigoted past. It was the location of several gruesome race murders and lynchings in 1899. Palmetto was also one of the towns offering reward money for the capture of Samuel Wilkes (aka Sam Hose), whose brutal lynching made international news and was written about by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her pamphlet, “Lynch Law in Georgia.” Community elders still recall the Klan marching through town as late as the 1960s.
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
It’s only in recent years that some of these racial wounds have begun to heal, and old dividing lines have begun to breakdown. The erosion of this institutional racism is evident in Mayor Thomas-Smith’s historic win and a more diverse City Council that now has more women and people of color.
“It’s been life-changing and purpose-affirming, all at the same time,” said Thomas-Smith, who ran on a campaign of “Believe in Palmetto” (and whose personal mantra is “No janky vibes”). “I truly believe that I was brought here by the divine to be a healer for my community. One-hundred seventy years and we’ve never had this kind of energy in town.”
The previous mayor, J. Clark Boddie, held that office since 1986, making him the longest-serving mayor in Fulton County. But, according to Thomas-Smith, Boddie ran the entire town as a “solo entity,” making decisions without significant external input. “There were a lot of people who didn’t want to work with him,” said Thomas-Smith about her predecessor. “And he had no love for the arts.”
Further, Mayor Thomas-Smith said, during his nearly four-decade mayorship, Boddie never updated City Hall’s procedures, record keeping or technology. “Eleven months in, and we’re still figuring things out,” she said. “Everything was put in place by the [previous] mayor in the 1980s. Even down to the software. It’s almost 40 years old — the software!” But Thomas-Smith laughs it off. “It’s a beautiful thing because it’s almost like we get to build an entire city from scratch.”
Thomas-Smith’s go-getter attitude and momentous election win inspired many that a change had finally come to Palmetto. One of those supporters was Jones, who’d been suffering from creative block and began sketching out fresh ideas again.
“I had gotten burned out on my work, and I kind of said no to everything for like a couple of years,” recalled Jones. “And then I started to feel that resurgence of the end of the creative block, and I was like: I’m here in this place, and no one’s ever attempted to dig into the story here. So let’s dig in.”
Despite having never been very politically active, Jones started attending City Council meetings, getting to know the mayor, council members and neighbors and pitching them on a portrait project. He wasn’t asking for sponsorship or funding — what he wanted was their participation. “It was important for me to stay independent,” said Jones. “I told them I’m doing this thing, and, please, everyone can come for free.”
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
In May 2024, Jones officially announced his project and opened a studio on Toombs Street in what used to be a dry goods store in one of the downtown’s historic buildings. Other than gathering portraits of locals in his stripped-bare studio, Jones had no idea what the final result would look like or if he would even get enough photos to realize the idea.
The community response, however, was decisive. Jones ended up taking portraits of more than 120 Palmetto residents and recording many of their oral histories in the process. “These murals were not even an idea yet,” said Jones. “I just thought: We’ll do these pictures — we’ll do prints, and there’ll be a traditional art exhibit, like I’ve done before, or maybe a book down the road.”
It didn’t hit Jones until later how being a resident of the community, photographing his neighbors and other people he knew would personally affect him and the art project. “It really pushed me to be even more positive, trustworthy and honest,” he said. “It really pushed me to the next level of accountability.”
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Instead of offering a gallery experience, Jones decided to display the images publicly on downtown Palmetto’s empty edifices and walls and to make them as large as possible. To achieve the latter, he printed the portraits in 24-by-36-inch panels and used a natural wheat paste, a centuries-old method, to adhere the portrait sections in place.
Using scaffolding and working top-down, Jones and several volunteers installed nearly all of the images in a single day. The panels were printed on newsprint-thin paper so they could be easily saturated with glue and stick to their surfaces. Because of this, the result is a photo mural that absorbs the texture of the wall behind it, a portrait not just of the people of Palmetto but of the town itself, its worn brick buildings, its roughness and resilience.
“I love that it’s messy and organic with the brick creating this ripple effect,” said Jones, who’s a proponent of taking art out of neatly curated halls and moving it into the streets.
The Palmetto Portrait Project depicts a more modern face of the city. A portrait near a pedestrian underpass reveals the proud visage of Fannie Brown, the oldest resident in town at 98 years. A few blocks away on an old brick facade, three different families stoically stare back: one Latino, one Black and one white with an adopted Asian American daughter. This is what Palmetto looks like today.
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
The project opened on Oct. 17, 2024, and was attended by the mayor, City Council members, locals and some curious out-of-towners. “It felt like the whole town came,” said Jones. “There was so much excitement, and person after person would tell me, ‘This is insane. This has never happened in Palmetto.’”
Trying to kick-start a small-town revitalization with artwork might seem like a pipe dream. However, Thomas-Smith and Jones have gathered some big backers, not just from citizens in Palmetto but also from the next town over, the affluent planned community of Serenbe. An example of new urbanism, Serenbe was created as a more walkable and biophilic country village with its own restaurants and coffee shops. Two of its major stakeholders, including Serenbe’s founder and chief developer, Steve Nygren, own property in downtown Palmetto and have expressed interest in bringing more culture and opportunity to the area.
“He believes in Palmetto and what we’re doing,” said Thomas-Smith about Nygren. “He’s grateful to have a neighbor who wants to see the area grow, and we’re working on a master plan.”
Palmetto’s current mayor also points to another talented and well-connected individual living in town, Lauri Stallings, the renowned dancer and founder of Atlanta’s glo, an artist-led creative platform focused on movement and choreography. Stallings recently spearheaded a wildflower beautification project that has yielded rich, beautiful blooms where there used to be overgrowth and gravelly curbs.
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
Credit: Photo by Andrew Hetherington
“Stallings’ wildflower project, Ray’s art portraits — there’s a blooming, a coming back to life to Palmetto,” said Thomas-Smith. “The Blooming City” is one of the new names the mayor has chosen for the town. “While it feels like we’re so behind the times, to be the steward of this right now, it overwhelms my heart with gratitude,” she said. “In a couple of years, people will look up Palmetto and it’ll be a destination city.”
Since the Palmetto Portrait Project’s images are made of paper and wheat paste, they will biodegrade over time. Jones says that’s the point — the impermanence of a town’s look, the changing faces and layers — and he’s already thinking about the project’s next phase. The resident artist can hardly walk around without being stopped by locals who ask him about people he photographed or when he’s opening up his studio again.
“The point of portraiture is to try to tell a little bit of a story through someone’s look, through their eyes, through their face,” Jones said. “So there’s a lot more story to tell here. And I want to keep telling it.”
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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