Marshall Christmas Parade, 12/21
While I’ll always be among the first to celebrate our county’s students and the work they produce, I can’t help but question the appropriateness in bringing a barbecue grill shaped like a gun to the birthday celebration for the Prince of Peace. It just doesn’t compute for me. And while I don’t consider myself religious or a believer, the birthday cake below is a far better representation of the day.
Marshall Christmas Parade, 12/21
Biltmore Estate/McDonald Bicycle Race, Hwy.25-70, Ivy River, Marshall, 1983.
Along with the Belle Cher Bicycle Races that began about 1981, the Biltmore/McDonalds Race was among the first to bring competitive bicycle racing to Western North Carolina. The net effect of those early races was to inform the cycling public that our dirt roads, trails, and small highways were perfect for active riders.
Now, almost 40 years after this pictured race, our, and many other surrounding communities, have become destination points for a new generation of bicycle enthusiasts. Downtown Marshall, especially on Saturday and Sunday, but every day really, sees dozens of cyclists. Most often they’ve come from Asheville, up the the River Road.
The River Road used to be the main route to Asheville from Marshall and beyond. Curvy, steep rock faces on one side and the river on the other, and a fair amount of traffic. The road alternated between a south facing stretch followed by a deeply shaded section that was treacherous on cold winter mornings.
The River Road has slowed since the new highway to Weaverville opened at about the same time as the race. There is little car traffic The same curves and bends and jagged overhangs, and the river. It’’s a stunning route, a scenic byway. Almost perfect for a bicycle.
Marshall, 10/21
Marshall, North Carolina 10/21
When I was in college in southern Ohio I, and a few friends, started an organization we called AWARE, the Association of Whites Against the Racist Environment. Our goal was education that we hoped would lead to healing. We would hold discussion groups, which we called “rap sessions,” with student clubs, in dormitories, in the cafeteria. At times the discussions became so heated I feared getting thrown out of the building or beat up on my way home. It became clear to me that the problem was not Black, but rather, white vehemence and determination to maintain the status quo.
I thought things would change over time, and they have. Young people especially have moved us forward. But as I look back 52 years, it depresses me to see that things haven’t changed all that much.
Here’s what I think about Critical Race Theory.
#1, I’m baffled by fuss the republicans are making of it and their determination to keep it out of the schools. The reality is it is not taught in any public elementary, middle, or high schools across the country. It is offered in upper level college courses and in law schools. So, they are creating a problem that doesn’t exist.
#2, One of the main reasons the repubs want to cancel CRT from classrooms is they don’t want their white children feeling guilty for being white. Well, as Warren Zevon would say, “Poor, poor, pitiful me.” If more white children, and adults, felt a level of guilt and responsibility for the racial inequities that exist in this country, we would be able to move forward in righting those centuries-old wrongs.
#3, I believe the purpose of education is to challenge the student with new ideas. We should be causing discomfort by presenting students with different belief systems and with deeper understandings of our nation’s history. I thoroughly believe that the more knowledge we have, the better off we will be. To ignore our history conveniently relieves us of the responsibility of acknowledging how that history is perpetuated in our present day.
#4, In my humble opinion, CRT should be mandatory for all students beginning in middle school. Only then, will students grow into adults who possess an understanding of our country’s, and their own, relationship with its Black citizens, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, and people of color.
#5, To say racism doesn’t exist, or that the Confederacy isn’t alive, is to ignore the obvious.
PawPaw, 11/21
What to make of a pair of discarded shoes?
Dead long before I arrived on the scene.
Unearthed in the long-needed demo of an old building.
Surfacing among feed sacks, ancient beer cans, and unknown pieces of metal.
Once they were nice, wing tips, black, shiny.
The shoes you wore to the office and had shined by a black man on a street corner.
Or to a dance with your honey. Leather soles to glide across the dance floor.
Not much use for them in this place, what with the cows and hogs, and the need for something more sturdy than dancing shoes.
I ask these shoes the same question I ask of most everyone I meet - How did you get here?
Where had you been before this place, only to end up buried in a corn crib, a home for rats, snakes and other critters.
Fancy places, I’d bet.
High rises with nice furniture. Homes with real carpet on the floor. Restaurants where their gloss reflects neon lights.
So, here’s the thing, I say.
Your past is important, if only in my imagination.
And therefore worth preserving.
So, I can nail you to the barn along with the tobacco baskets and plow points. A memory of what exactly?
Or, like your previous owner, I can relegate you to the trash heap.
This time to the county landfill, the high end of dumps.
There, you’re liable to meet more of your kind, other shoes, boots perhaps, musty slippers.
And ultimately, you might feel more at home.
After a long layoff where I’ve made very few images, I find I’m returning to the world of photography. Portraiture has always been my favorite. Here are some recent pix. No Pulitzer Prize winners here, but just simple portraits of people, some I’ve known for many years, others I’ve recently met. I like all of them.
Joe Bruneau, Marshall.
Ryan Price, Marshall.
Steve Davidowski, Anderson Branch.
Keilana, Ella Grace and Rocco, in Marshall from Los Angeles for the Amazon series production.
Susie Mosher, Marshall
Drew DiTomo, Marshall.
Me and Tony at the 4th of July picnic at my grandmother’s house in Silver Spring, Md, ca. 1954-5. I’m the one with the gun in lieu of a camera.
Tony and I go way back. Our mothers were first cousins and best friends. So, when my mother birthed me in late December, 1947, and Tony’s mother, Cel Vitto, brought Tony into the world seven months later, it was quite natural for us to spend time together. When Tony’s brother, Nicky, was born a year and a half later, the three of us made a team of sorts, often with the express purpose of harassing my two younger sisters.
Tony and I went in separate directions in high school and college, sometimes seeing each other during holidays for touch football games or over at Aunt Mary’s for Italian cookies, pastries, and liquor for the adults. Despite the distances between us and the different life experiences, there remained an indelible bond between us, one forged through family, memory, and instant familiarity and ease.
Tony with Willie Mays on Willie Mays Bobblehead Day, in San Francisco.
Tony was a student of science and a brief scan of his obituary will show you the heights to which he took both his research work and his medical practice. I always thought he was the smartest person in the family although I have since learned that smartness comes in many different forms. Even so, Tony was a very bright guy, but as down to earth as a person could possible be. He was generous and funny with an infectious laugh that would dominate a room. Inquisitive, curious, and with an incredible memory for detail.
Tony clearly loved life and he enjoyed it to the fullest. Music, from opera to rock n’ roll; sports of all kinds; food was another passion and he was an excellent cook; and, of course, wine.
He had expensive taste. I remember being at his office in Morgan Hill when he asked if I could help him load some boxes into his Mercedes. There were maybe a couple of dozen boxes, all the same, stamped with Italian words, some of which I understood. “What is this stuff?,” I asked. “That’s my Pope water,” he replied. “I drink the same water as the Pope and have it delivered from Rome. I do the same with my Balsamic.” It was a head-shaking moment for me.
Tony showing off his taste in exotic food, Morgan Hill, CA.
It seemed that as we aged we had more contact with one another. Visits with him in California and Massachusetts, meetups in Maryland for weddings, and, while not frequent, there were regular phone calls over the years. Leslie and I spoke of visiting Tony in New Jersey when he got settled, along with other family and friends on the Peninsula.
I hadn’t spoken with Nicky in a few years so when my phone said I was getting a call from him I suspected it to be about Tony. He had been having health problems lately and struggling with a number of long drawn-out personal issues, but I knew he was looking to the future with a positive outlook and anticipation of what the future would bring. I’ll miss you, cousin.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/anthony-vitto-obituary?id=19853076
PawPaw, Madison County, NC, 10/21
When I first moved to Madison County in 1973 I was convinced the operative word for the county was “Slow.” For someone raised in a large metropolitan area, my new home seemed to work on a snails’ pace. People spoke slowly, as if deliberating each individual word. And walking was no faster, with every step taken with care and assurance. Driving was much the same and I remember getting behind old timers going 15 mph down Big Pine Road, much to the frustration of everyone behind them. It didn’t matter what you were doing - visiting, doing business, working, entertaining - people didn’t get in a hurry. They approached life with stoicism, calmness, and patience, essentially letting the world come to them. Time was the one thing you were always willing to share.
It’s not like that around here any more. We as a county have done our level best to catch up to the rest of the country. We are a busy crowd with schedules to keep and places to go, and we have to get there fast. And with that loss of “Slow” we risk losing respect and consideration for the world around us.
I don’t see us returning to those days of old. We’re too enamored with the things that speed up our lives - computers, cell phones, caffeine, constant movement. Covid has served to change our habits somewhat. We’ve stayed home more, gone out less, and learned how to entertain ourselves. But it hasn’t stuck. We are more than ready to return to a more frantic pace.
I’m reminded of a day years ago. Doug Wallin asked me to drive him to his tax preparer’s house. Doug didn’t get out much. He never married and stayed at home with his aging mother, Berzilla, farming tobacco, raising most of what they ate, tending the family land, and becoming Madison County’s premier ballad singer. It was a short drive from Craine Branch to Shelton Laurel, 15 minutes at most, but a significant excursion for Doug. It was a rainy day, misty, made for mournful ballads, and Doug sang for much of the drive. On our way back, we got to the spot in the road the locals referred to as Peach Tree, that was the dividing line between Sodom, Lonesome Mountain, Guntertown, and Shelton Laurel. Doug stopped singing, seemed to sniff the air, and said, “Well, we’re back to God’s Country.”
I suspect that such a well defined sense of place, and the slowness necessary to achieve it, is out of reach for most of us. It’s not who we are anymore. But I do think the closer we can come to that sense of Slow the better off we will be.
Marshall Glove Plant, 1979.
Of all of the photographs I made at the Marshall Glove Plant in 1979, this one has long been my favorite and the only one I’ve published in the last 42 years. Why?
Foremost is the directness and openness of her interaction with me - the trust that my camera will represent her for who she is, nothing more, nothing less.
There is an angelic quality to her gaze - a Madonna of the Mill if you will. There is a clear sense of pride in her work, her pleasure at having this job, and the knowledge she is bringing likely needed income to her family.
Yet photographs also have an ability to see beyond the obvious and offer a contrary opinion to our surface observations. And what I see is the lint coating her blouse, her chest and neck, and around her face. And I wonder what repeated exposure to that lint is doing to her lungs and respiratory system - the prevalence of brown lung disease among mill workers, a not-so-distant cousin to black lung disease among mine workers.
My friend, and extraordinary photographer, Titus Heagins, commented on my last post from the Capitola Mill that throughout history women have always been tasked with the “heavy lifting”, the hard and dirty jobs. He’s right, of course.
It reminds of a phrase I heard not long after moving to the mountains - “Men’s Work.” I was helping neighbors with their tobacco or tomatoes, I can’t remember which, and I noticed that the women were doing the harder and dirtier jobs, while the men seemed to have claimed the far easier work for themselves; work that offered the opportunity for more breaks, visiting, cigarettes, and generally far less intensive work, being the boss. When I asked what those men were doing over by the truck talking, having a beer, smoking while the women were hauling sticks of tobacco to the barn in 90 degree heat, they replied, “Oh, they’re doing men’s work.”
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The Capitola Mill reopens on Thursday, October 21, from 5-8 pm. Music, eats, conviviality. Come see Marshall’s most recent rebuild effort brought to you by Pete Whitlock, and Matthew Lucas and his talented crew at EveryAngle Construction. It’s a work of art.
One of the first things I noticed when I entered the Glove Plant was that the vast majority of people working were women. There were a few men acting as supervisors or doing the heavy lifting, but the actual work - the sewing, the attention to detail, the sitting in the same position for eight hours a day - was being done by women.
I knew a couple of the women and they, and most of the others, were glad to get the work. There weren’t many jobs available in Madison County in the late 1970s beyond farming and fabric mills provided a steady paycheck. Plus, while the work was hard and monotonous, most people knew one another so there was a sense of family and working with friends.
The Mill has been closed since the early 1990s, but is about to be reborn. The Opening is this Thursday, the 21st, from 5-8 pm. Come take a look.
Marshall Glove Plant, 1979.
Marthie Chandler, the Marshall Glove Plant, 1979.
The Marshall Glove Plant, 1979
In 1979, I was working on a Photo Survey grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. As part of the project I spent a day photographing in the Marshall Glove Plant, where county residents made brown cotton work gloves. The Glove Plant closed in the early 1990s and was basically abandoned. Until now. Pet Whitlock of Mosaic Management in Atlanta has renovated the old Capitola Mill into apartments and studio and office space, bringing the building back to life.
As it turns out my photographs from 1979 are the only existing images of the Glove Plant while it was in operation and Pete is hanging a number of them in the renovated Mill to remind all of us of what once was.
There will be a grand opening of the Capitola Mill on Thursday, October 21, from 5-8 pm. I encourage everyone to come out and revisit a part of Madison County's history.
Main Street, Marshall, NC, 9/21
These photographs do not represent the Madison County I have lived in, and loved, for the last forty-seven years. These are not the people I have considered friends and neighbors since I’ve called this place home. Yes, evil and hatred have always been here; they’ve never been hard to find if one took the time to look. But the anger has mostly stayed hidden quietly beneath the surface, occasionally rearing its head in the form of protests against asphalt plants, or “we still pray,” or development. People, neighbors, had learned to be around one another, even though the “other” might have radically different opinions and cultural habits. There was a mutual respect and the knowledge that the “other” would always be there in time of need, like a good neighbor. I sense that attitude has changed. We seem to have lost the ability to be tactful with our differences and find common ground with all our community members.
I think about that often, common ground, and ask what is the common ground within our increasingly diverse population? I start with the mountains themselves. I can say with certainty they are sacred for all of us. We live here because of the mountains and the role they play in our lives. Newcomers and born-in- county residents choose to be here because we all appreciate what the mountains mean to our very existence.
We’re in a bad place now, both in our county and in our country. The divisions are sharper, more pronounced, and the displays of vehemence more blatant and ugly. Groups of people seem unable to accept any outcome they disagree with and invent their own facts to fit any situation. Society cannot function if there is no agreement about what is truth. I fear things will only get worse.
Walking today in the mountains surrounding our home, the dogs chasing squirrels and flushing grouse as we walk, the leaves beginning their change, the light more angular, I’m struck, as always, by the quiet. This million-of-years old granite beneath my feet doesn’t say much. But it does offer stability, firmness, and the belief it will always be here. Its change is so slow and meticulous. Trees age and fall, slabs of rock sheer off, hillsides collapse, all of it happening over time, years, ions.
And I ask, what is the mountain’s message for us?
Main Street, Marshall, NC 9/21
Marshall, 09/21
We want to believe we live in an open and welcoming community. And we do. Madison County and Marshall welcomed me and others over forty years ago and continue to embrace the flocks of new people moving here in recent years. I’ve always felt that openness was one of the county’s best features and certainly something that kept me here.
But I think we are fooling ourselves if we assume everyone thinks this way. They don’t. The signs are everywhere in the county—confederate flags, trump billboards, election signage—all speaking to divisiveness, hate, and fear. This is our reality, this unsettledness and division within our community, and we ignore it at our peril.
Main Street, Marshall, 9/21
Sometimes when you set out to make pictures you’re not satisfied with much of anything you imaged. I set out the other day to make some pictures in town, something I hadn’t done much of lately. There’s a couple of nice portraits I like and many record photographs, evidence so to speak, of some of the changes in town, which feel flat and lacking energy.
So, it interested me that the most visually interesting image of the whole bunch was when I accidentally tripped the shutter as I was getting out of my car. The composition is dynamic, the framing is contained, yet there’s a manic energy within that tight frame. I love the spontaneity. And it’s full of information. Make of my car. It needs a good bath. Leaves in the gutter, so approaching fall. A strap, probably the camera. And that block of color, blue, azule, leading the eye to my seemingly opposite facing feet. What is going on here?
I sometimes suggest to students that they set the self timer on their cameras and trip the shutter as they throw it in the air, just to see what they get. The idea is to loosen up your approach to picture making. Be more intuitive and spontaneous. Respond more to your instincts and less to your head when making pictures. You might be surprised by what you get. I know that I often am. It’s like life.
Scott Pilar’s Hair and Steve Davidowski’s Hands, Music/Pizza night at Paul and Laurie’s, 2021, Anderson Branch.
Sometimes when making pictures you don’t see the possibilities of two images working together until well after the making. Maybe on a contact sheet, or in front of the computer, does one see the potential of placing two pictures together. This combination isn’t perfect, the space between the images needs to be removed, but I haven’t figured out how to do that on Squarespace. It works much better on my Facebook page. <https://www.facebook.com/rob.amberg>
I like the individuality of each image, they speak to documentary moments. But when squeezed together, boundaries touching, they become something else. Still those facts, that evidence, but now with a surreal, but almost believable, look.
Sheriff E.Y. Ponder and Deputies with busted marijuana, Marshall, 1979.
Come to the Old Marshall Jail Hotel and Bar on Thursday, June 17, from 4 to 8 for an Open House where you will be able to see this photograph, along with artifacts, memorabilia, art, and community bricks. Josh and Emily Copus have created a work of art that speaks to Madison County’s history and culture and illustrates the vibrant renewal of downtown Marshall, Madison’s County Seat.
I’m honored to have this photograph, along with four others, hanging in the renovated Old Marshall Jail. The photograph is of convicted murderers Philip Turpin and Lorenzo ‘Crews being led from the Courthouse back to the jail.
In the renovated jail, now a hotel and bar, Josh and Emily Copus have included the photograph along with artifacts that turn this singular image into a piece of Madison County history. In this case the history presented is one of the more notorious crimes in the county, one that shook us to our core.
At the Madison County Jail Hotel and Bar
One amazing piece of history that I didn’t know, but learned because of Josh and Emily’s research is that one of the murder victims was a man named Bennie Hudgins. It seems Mr. Hudgins spent May 17 and 18, 1970, in the Madison County jail and during his time there etched this message onto a metal plate that is next to the photograph and other artifacts. A true blending of art and history.
Josh and Emily will be hosting an Open House at the renovated jail on June 17 from 4 to 8. So come to the Old Marshall Jail Hotel and Bar and learn a bit of our history and thank them for their efforts to keep our history alive.
PawPaw, Madison County, NC 04-23-21
Benny at the Rat House, Marshall, NC 1985
I’m sure most parents say this, but it’s hard for me to believe I have a child who is forty-one years old.
This picture was made when Benny was five. I was newly single and struggling to get my photography work in front of people. We moved a lot in those first years—the cabin on Big Pine, downtown Marshall in a converted warehouse space, The Rat House, a house in Asheville, an apartment in Durham, and finally closing the circle and moving back to Big Pine. We did this in four years.
Benny was a trooper throughout and I look back at our time together then with fondness. Time at the beach, marching in Civil Rights Rallies, playing in Wilson Cove Branch on Big Pine, train rides.
The Rat House is not one of those fond memories. The place was fine when we moved in, but within weeks we were seeing rat droppings and then rats most mornings. We set out bait, and traps, and knocked them back for a few weeks, but they always returned, in seemingly greater numbers, and wise to our defenses. We moved.
I bring this up because Benny and I are dealing with rats again. Benny at his house in Portland and us in our barn on Paw Paw. Again, we set out bait and traps. We moved our chickens to a rat-proof enclosure and removed access to their food sources. We await warm weather and the awakening of the two black snakes who live in the barn. Benny called an exterminator who set traps and bait. That first morning he called to say he had caught three baby rats in one trap, all craving their first, and last, taste of peanut butter.
“Gram,” Silver Spring, Maryland 1992
I’ve thought a lot about what to write on this, the last day of Women’s History Month. Although I’ve written about my maternal grandmother before on this blog, I could think of no other person more important to my history than her. Jennie Lozupone Galeano.
She was born in Gioia del Colle, Italy, and migrated to this country with her family in 1906. In that regard her story is no different than the millions of immigrants who came to the United States fleeing poverty and political strife, all looking for opportunity and a better life.
She married young to a Sicilian immigrant, Joe Galeano, and they had four children in quick succession. Along the way she discovered she had a gift with her hands and began working in Jimmy Bello’s tailor shop in downtown Washington. There, she made suits for Franklin Roosevelt and robes for the Supreme Court justices, along with dresses and suits for her grandchildren.
She and Joe fashioned a good life. Sunday dinners with family and friends, poker games on Saturday night (my grandmother loved cards, and bingo, and the racetrack), and enough money to buy a house in suburban Maryland. My mother would tell a story of coming home from school, or her job, and finding her parents sitting at the kitchen table, a open jar of hot peppers and a bottle of anisette between them, both of them laughing and sweating like there was no tomorrow.
That proved to be the case for my grandfather who died from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in the summer of 1948, when I was six months old. They had just bought their house on University Boulevard and Gram immediately understood the difficulty she would have paying the mortgage. So, my parents, with me in tow, moved in with her so she could keep her house. My mother went back to her government job and my grandmother became my caregiver for the next three or four years.
During that time my grandmother imprinted with me: the memory of her childhood in Puglia, her accent and mix of Italian and English, the smells and tastes of her food, her belief in family. Much of that has stayed with me to this day. Four years ago when Leslie and I visited Italy, we stopped briefly in Gioia del Colle and I was struck by how familiar and comfortable the place felt, even though I’d never been there before. I can only understand that as genetic memory, my grandmother’s imprint on my young mind.
Jennie eventually went back to work at the tailor shop until it closed. She continued sewing for us kids and later made vestments for the priests in our Catholic parish. As she aged, her eyesight began to fail so she shifted to crochet, making multi-colored Afghans, which she called “Africans” because her language couldn’t quite comprehend the word “Afghan.”
She gifted me the first one she made and, to this day, I sleep under it every night, secure in my memory of her and the history she bequeathed to me.
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