A Hero

 

 

I had the opportunity to photograph the Amerian activist poet, writer and journalist, John Beecher, in 1976 for an Asheville arts monthly named The Arts Journal. Beecher was descended from the same family of New England abolitionists that produced Harriet Beecher Stowe and actively wrote about the American Labor and Civil Rights Movements. He was living in Burnsville when I met him, eking out a living as a printer and publisher. He had lost his teaching job at San Francisco State University in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era, for refusing to sign a state loyalty oath. The law was overturned in 1967 and he was reinstated to his teaching position in 1977. Beecher returned to San Francisco State in 1979 for what turned out to be the last year of his life.

I took Mr. Beecher a copy of this print and a copy of The Arts Journal, which had run it on the cover. He looked at it and said, “It makes me look like Job.” I sensed he wasn’t exactly pleased with the representation. But as I thought about Beecher’s life of activism and integrity, and the losses he had suffered because of it, I realized the likeness with Job was perhaps more than just mere representation.

 

Cameras, Guns, and Stealing Souls

Every couple of years, a few of my photographer friends come out to our land to shoot guns. We walk far back into the woods, mount targets on trees, and blast away; usually doing more damage to grass and soil than we do to the targets or the trees that hold them. This photograph is of my friend Larry White, a fine art photographer and former instructor at UNCA, shooting a .45 caliber Colt revolver owned by our mutual friend, Ben Porter, and used by Ben’s father in World War II.

I’ve long been fascinated by the likenesses between cameras and guns. The similar language comes first to mind – the loading and unloading, the shooting, the aiming and framing, the “target rich environment” photographers sometimes refer to when discussing an image-filled situation. But it is the actual making of photographs, and the stoppage of time that occurs every time we press a camera’s shutter, that is perhaps most analogous to the firing of guns.

The sole purpose of firearms is, of course, to stop time, to end the life of whatever we shoot at. Now, I understand we often use guns to threaten and to protect, or in the case of my buddies in the woods, to practice our marksmanship and bond in a manly kind of way. But the primary purpose of a gun is to kill – to stop the life of whatever or whoever it is pointed at.

One might say that cameras and pictures are not nearly so nefarious. Yes, they too stop time, but they do so for the sake of memory. Time is momentarily stilled, but life goes on beyond the image. While we don’t physically end someone’s life when we make their photograph, I would argue that we can, and often do, choose to use our cameras as tools for character assassination – to embarrass a political candidate perhaps or by posting an unflattering photograph of someone on Facebook. One only has to think of the body language that came into use with the invention of photography – the hands over the face, the shielding from view – to understand the power of this tool.

Years ago, when I started making photographs in a serious way, I heard of people who wouldn’t allow photographs to be made of themselves because they believed pictures stole a person’s soul. It was easy enough to dismiss these beliefs as primitive or unsophisticated, but the longer I’ve worked in this medium; the more I understand the truth of those “primitive” beliefs. I don’t call it “soul stealing,” but I know every time I trip the shutter of my camera, I’m trying to capture the essence of a person or situation, and fix it in time for all the world to see.

My Father

 

My father, had he lived, would have been ninety-four years old on September 15. He died of a mix of what I think of as modern ailments – diabetes, high blood pressure, and a persistent melanoma that began on his leg and eventually traveled to his brain. He passed in February, 2002, a few months shy of his 84th birthday, and shortly before publication of my first book, Sodom Laurel Album. That he didn’t live to see the book, or hear my lecture on the book at the Library of Congress, is one of the great regrets of my life.

Dad, and my mother too, was a product of the Great Depression and that experience was communicated to me, his oldest child, in the form of suggestions regarding what I should major in in college. I wanted to study history and anthropology and English although at the time I certainly had no idea how one made a living with such esoteric interests. Dad, thinking practically, and with his long memory of difficult times as a teenager, suggested business because I would always be able to get a job.

I got my degree in Personnel Management, but business didn’t stick with me. I spent more than a few years searching for the right fit, eventually coming back to my first love of writing and, a later learned-love, photography. My decision to pursue my art was difficult for both of my parents to understand or accept. Why would I not use my degree? Why would I choose a profession with such insecurity attached to it? Why would I pick something I knew so little about? My father, while mystified, also told me he would be proud of anything I did as long as I was productive. 

Some years later, after some success, when it seemed my decision had been the right one, my father revisited the decision that sent me to business school. We were at an exhibit of my work in Charlotte and he was talking with a friend who was filming the conversation for posterity. He explained his insistence that I take business, my pleas to study the humanities, and my ultimate stubbornness about following my own path. At that point in the conversation, he looked around the gallery and said, “But this is really nice work.”

That sentence was perhaps my father’s most important gift to me. In those few short words, he gave me acceptance and understanding while  showing me his own ability to change and be flexible. But most importantly, he gave me an important message about parenting, about accepting our children for who they are, not who we want them to be. 

 

 

Heard at the Harris Family Reunion

 

I live in the past a lot of times. I go to sleep at night and dream of what happened years ago.

When we was coming up, the old people would be sitting and talking and they wouldn't want the children to sit and listen. They'd say, 'go off and play.' So, we didn't know nothing, unless we asked them, and it was very little that we could ask them about.

I did hear one time that Grandma and Grandpa run off and got married. He went into the Army at 17. He was a Confederate soldier. I've got his certificate. I remember him saying that when he was in the Army, he was going down the road and he found a piece of cornbread in the wagon tracks. He said he didn't shave much dirt off that cornbread because he was so hungry. He said it tasted like candy.

I remember the first linoleum that daddy ever got. Me and Howard thought that was something special. We got down and just sat on it and slid all over the floor.

‘You make a quilt every year and you'll never go without cover,’ Grandma said.

Like my sister, my older sister, when she lived in Washington, she had a neighbor whose husband was sick with cancer. And Laura was out hanging up clothes and she hollered out over to the neighbor, ‘Mrs. Cheney, how is your husband doing?' Mrs. Cheney answered back, 'I guess he's doing all right, I buried him six months ago.' And Laura didn't even know he was dead. That's just about the way it's got. We live right beside one another, but we don't mix with the people. We don't take the time.

I thought about it as we were coming up the road. I would like to have a paper and write down everybody's names, like yours, and your children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Somebody, some day, is gonna want that record.

Your Own Place

 

At what point in time does a place become your own? Is it when you finally finish paying off the mortgage and have the deed of trust in your hands? Is it when you realize you love it so much you will fight and die for it? Does it take living on it for a specific amount of time before you know it is yours? Is it when you've birthed children on it? Or buried a family member in it? Perhaps the better questions are: does a place ever become your own? Is it possible to ever really own land?

When I was documenting the construction of I-26, I had a conversation with Richard Dillingham, a seventh generation mountaineer who at the time was curator of the Rural Life Museum at Mars Hill College. Richard described to me his evolution on the subject of land ownership in the wake of so many people losing land to eminent domain for the new interstate highway. During an archeological dig prior to the road construction, Dillingham said, a 12,000 year old clovis spear point was discovered close to the land that had been in his family for 200 years. The realization that people had inhabited his family land for thousands of years put his own family's ownership of that same land in perspective for him. He began to understand we never really own anything – that we are mere stewards, charged with the responsible management of land entrusted to our care.

When my daughter was a child, I would often tell her bedtime stories of a young Native American girl who visited our land hundreds of years ago. I would talk about how that girl, and her family, had stayed for short periods of time hunting game and berries, and perhaps even hid from soldiers during the Great Removal. I spoke of how that girl, like my daughter, had played in the woods and creek, slept under the stars, and drunk water from our springs. It was a story based on the facts of pottery chards and broken arrow points found along our creek bottom after plowing. It's doubtful that Native girl of my imagination thought of this place as something she owned, as most Native peoples eschewed ownership of land. But I wonder if she thought of this place as hers. Did she, like my daughter, hide in the crevice of the big rock and find secret places in the woods? Did she come to feel at ease in our forest, even in the dark of night, and during the storms of summer? Did she have a sense of care for this place, knowing in turn that the place would care for her? And is this reciprocal nature of care and time the true measure of when a place becomes your own?

 

The Gift of Access

 

 

Throughout my career I've been invited to share the lives of many people. Sometimes those relationships have been brief – lasting long enough for a brief conversation or a photograph or two. Others have lasted a lifetime. I was asked recently why people would let me photograph or write about them in an intimate manner? Why would they let me into the day-to-day of their lives? Partly, this has to do with my ability to find common ground and gain trust with most people; not all. In the mountains people would say about me that “he's never known a stranger.” It's a trait I inherited from my Chicago-born father, and he from his. My children and siblings are much the same way. For me, given what I do, it's meant that people ultimately trust I will represent them, their families, and their communities in a way that's open, honest, and believable. But beyond “being natured that way,” as Dellie would have said, people have come into my life through the gift of access.

I was thinking about this last week as I wrote about Tanese – how did I get there? How could I have possibly found the Wilson family and been in the position to make that portrait of Tanese? It was through Jean Wynot who, with her husband Ralph, owned a dairy in a neighboring county. Jean was also a farm activist who regularly re-structured farm plans for farmers facing foreclosure, working through the same organization I freelanced with. One of the farm families Jean worked with was the Wilsons. She spoke with Tanese's father, Doug, about me and soon asked me to join her for a visit. I could never have gotten there on my own. It happens this way for most documentary-type photographers and writers. In almost all cases, someone – a mutual friend, an organization, a neighbor who “knows this guy” – brought us into these new worlds and made it possible for us to tell their stories.

We've all received help along our diverse life paths – access to a photo shoot, a student loan or government grant, land willed to us by our parents, a recommendation for a job, or an idea from a friend. Perhaps, it's simply the good roads and communication networks provided us that help us run our businesses or sell our products. It's rare, near impossible, for any of us to make it entirely by ourselves. For Doug Wilson, his gift was a prothesis and physical therapy that allowed him to continue farming with his family. Understanding, and accepting, our interdependency doesn't diminish our accomplishments. It doesn't say I didn't make my photographs or create my books. It doesn't say you didn't do the work to get that degree, or farm that land, or build that business. It doesn't mean “You didn't build that.” What it means is we recognize we've all had help along the way. And perhaps we would function better as a society if we remained humbled by and thankful for living in a place where help is available when each of us needs it.  

 

Tanese

I think often about Tanese Wilson. I met her about twenty-five years ago on a visit to her parent’s dairy in the small community of Waco, North Carolina. At that time Doug Wilson, Tanese’s father, was one of three remaining black dairymen in the state. It was a small farm, milking fewer than 100 cows, with adjoining fields for hay, corn for silage, and a large garden. It was a family operation and, more than most small farmers, Doug depended on his family for help. His wife had developed multiple sclerosis some years earlier that left her unable to do any of the hard work of farming and then Doug lost his left arm to the PTO shaft on his tractor. Tanese, though still in high school, became his right-hand person, getting up long before daylight to help Doug milk, going to school, and then going back to the barn long after dark for the evening milking. She spoke to me about wanting to join the service after high school so she could learn a trade and help provide for the family she wanted to have.  

She got pregnant her senior year. As determined as her father, she finished school and got a job as a secretary with a local business. After her child was born, the child’s father refused to provide any support and Tanese made it clear he would not see his child until he did. She continued living with her parents and went back to work, her mother and grandmother caring for her baby while she was on the job. One day, sitting behind her desk, surely with a photograph of her young daughter in front of her, he walked into the office, pulled out a handgun, and shot her. She died before the ambulance arrived.

I visited the Wilsons some months later. It had not been an easy time and it was difficult for Doug to talk about any of it. The man would be in jail for a long time, but Doug and Genevieve had had to fight his family for custody of the baby – a fight they won, but left them emotionally and financially drained. Despite all of this - his injury, his wife’s illness, his daughter’s death, their financial struggles – Doug remained humble, thankful for his granddaughter’s presence in their lives, and the memory she provided them of Tanese. 

Get Right

When I moved to Madison County in 1973, this barn and its attached sign were prominent on the Marshall Bypass. Heading west on Hwy. 25-70, it was impossible to not see the barn or get the message. I’m almost certain this is the first photograph I made in Madison County. 

I’ve never been able to find the negative and the only evidence of the image was an old, badly printed 6x8 print; and my memory of making the picture. The print was relatively easy to fix with the help of digital imaging and a great assistant. But the actual picture making - stopping on the road, getting out my camera and pressing the shutter - proved to be harder than I would have imagined.

I was concerned about making a photograph of someone’s private property, knowing the high value local people placed on their land and their land rights. I didn’t want to get shot, or yelled at, and it didn’t occur to me to find the owner and ask permission. I just knew I wanted, to the point of need, to have that image. So, one sleety day, after driving by the barn three or four times to make sure no one was there, I stopped and stole a shot, not without a certain amount of guilt.

It’s a ubiquitous message in the rural South, and maybe it’s because I live where I live that it seems more evident in mountain communities. In 1973, coming from the North and Midwest, it was not something I had ever seen before and this barn became a clear symbol of my move to a place I knew nothing about. There was something about the starkness and the fundamentalism of the sign, and the prominence of its display, that made me feel that by making a picture of it I would be signing onto the program, or at the very least, accepting the fact that demonstrative belief played a big role in the community.

The sign is long gone, as is the barn, although the message remains. I see it everywhere – tacked to trees, printed on plywood, black on white.It’s a good message – Get Right With God – and I now can comfortably translate it to mean simply being at peace with myself, and my personal notion of a higher power. Years ago, however, the message for me was fearful, demanding and narrow, with an unmistakable “or else” quality about it. It gave me pause – not only for my very soul, but for how that unbending dogma would cast a shadow over my life should I stay.

The Depot

 

Every now and again, if I pay attention, I’m actively reminded of why I continue to live in Madison County. Sometimes these reminders come on my walk, the smell and taste of the air, or the way the light hits the trees. I’m reminded every time I put another log, cut from our place, in our stove that heats our house, or drink water from our spring that flows from a rock face high on our place. Friday night I had cause to remember, once again, why my decision to make Madison County my home was the right one.

I hadn’t been to The Depot in a number of years. There’s no particular reason why I hadn’t been lately, although, if I had to give a reason, it’s because the sheer diversity and quality of music in and around Marshall these days makes it impossible to hear all of it. It was easy to just not stop in, even though, it’s always packed on Friday nights and everyone seems to be smiling.

When I moved here in 1973, there were relatively few new people in the community and those of us that did move in quickly learned the local people were great sources of information about living here and very generous in their sharing of that information. I think they were pleased that people were interested in learning from them. There were exceptions, of course – the You ain’t from around here people – who held your foreignness against you and seemed to resent your presence in their world. I expect some of those people still exist today. Mostly though, and what I was reminded of Friday night, was the simple and elegant kindness of the people. The ways they would include us in their lives. Bring us gifts from their gardens, or heirloom seeds they had gotten from their parents, or invitations to parties and decorations. There was a joy in being with family and friends - dancing, listening to music, sharing words and cakewalks. And all it took was showing up and you were included.

As things were winding down Friday night – after the drawings and cakewalks, the dances and music, the thank you to the service man in attendance, and the haunting witnessing song by Nancy Roberts – an older man slowly moved towards us in the front row and stopped in front of the woman sitting next to us. He was in overalls and she in a simple country dress and they had danced earlier in the evening. With a shy gentleness he put his hand on her shoulder and thanked her for the dance. “I hope I see you again next week,” he said. 

 

 

 

Evidence of Ewes Unseen

With thanks to Marianne Wiggins and Jamie Paul

Two images depicting the same scene – one done digitally in color, the other made with medium format film (2.25” x 2.25”) in black and white. The scene – pieces of sheep wool caught on a barbwire fence surrounding a pasture. The sheep use the fence as a scratching post. Both images are sharp with the wool and wire isolated against an out-of-focus background. Both pictures are about time, which is represented by the slight movement of the wool in the wind. Neither image reveals any noise – pixels in the case of the digital picture or grain in the film print. The questions for this photographer are: is the black and white image, because it’s made with the more labor-intensive, hands-on medium of film, more a photograph than the electronically produced color picture? Or are they simply different approaches to the same scene that contain the same photographic properties – an external reality, attention to detail, a concern with time, or the unique way photography frames its subjects?

For me, a photographer with forty years experience with film, who was never enamored with the darkroom experience, the difference matters little. The content of the picture has always been more important than how I get there. 

Walk 1

 

Most days, I walk. Often, I’m in the woods – hiking up to our spring to flush silt from the water pipe and springbox, or to clear brush on the trail to the top of the mountain behind our house. Usually though, I walk the unpaved road that fronts our land – down the driveway and to the right, across the one-lane bridge that links Anderson Branch with Paw Paw Road, stopping usually at Robert and Jane’s driveway. There, I do some stretching, Yoga poses, before heading back along the same route.

It’s not a particularly difficult route – long enough and with enough elevation change to benefit my heart and increase my stamina. I feel better when I’m regular about it. I walk when it's hot and when it's cold. I walk in the wet and in the dry. A morning walk clears my head for the day ahead; in the evening, it flushes my brain of the day just past. In winter, I often walk in the dark with a headlamp, or by the light of the moon.

Mostly, my walk has to do with knowing the place where I live and my own sensory responses to it. It’s the same walk, over and over, although it changes endlessly. The light in the trees, so harsh and brittle in the middle of a summer day, becomes soft and textured during a fall rain. The smell, one moment clean and crisp, the next stagnant and decaying from a dead possum in the ditchline. The feel of the road itself on the soles of my feet – soft and muddy after a downpour, slick with ice or snow, dusty in a dry spell, rough when freshly scraped and graveled. The sounds – an occasional vehicle, a distant chainsaw, the sharp crack of a rifle during deer season, an airplane high above are the only man-made punctuations to the sounds that never change – the wind in the trees, the flow of the creek, the birds overhead, the same sounds heard for millennia by people who always walked and intimately knew the place.