Van Griffin

 

Van Griffin at the Rodeo, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 2012

Van Griffin died last night.

I didn’t know Van all that well, but what I knew of him I liked.  I met him a few years ago through his son, Toby, and would run into him with frequency in downtown Marshall, or on the Bypass, and always at the rodeo and county fair. He was forever  ready to talk and was always generous with me – never refusing a request to make his photograph.

Van was a common man; and I say that in the most complimentary of ways. Easy to be around, no pretensions, funny, fun-loving. Here in the mountains, people would say he was a good ol’ boy. He kept chickens, lots of chickens, and regularly won prizes for them at the county and regional fairs.

This morning as I write this, I know Van is at peace after a long illness. I think of his family – his wife Ruth, his children – Toby, Keith, and Jan, his grandchildren – Levi, Jordan, Savannah, and Kaitlin, his brother Coy and his sister Jacksie. Death is always hardest for those left behind, but I know we will carry memories of this kind, graceful man with us for a long time and those memories will cause us to smile.

Absent # 2

Having a black bear rubbing against your chest is a hard act to follow, but after leaving Ben and Debbie Kilham, I drove on to western Massachusetts to meet with John Freeman and his sister Jane. They lived on an amazing piece of land, dotted and marked with artifacts and burial grounds from native and settler times. They took me to the original boundary marker that deeded their land to a distant ancestor from Native Americans in the late 16th century. Like many ancestral and historical forests, the Freeman’s land is surrounded by development and they’re under increasing pressure to sell the property because of high land values and corresponding high taxes. I don’t like the word “magical” so much, thinking it overused and easy. But I did, in fact, spend a magical day walking with them and their friends, Archie and Dave, through a primordial landscape in the misting rain.

 

Top, John and Jane Freeman. Bottom, left, Native Donation Pile, right, John and Jane Freeman with Dave Beyor and Harrison Achilles.


I arrived home to an email from Apple notifying me of a potential hard drive crash and a need to immediately replace it. This is always disconcerting news if, as most photographers in the modern world do, you store your files digitally. That hard drive represents years of work. Thank you for back up – one of technology’s blessings. But my assistant, Jamie Paul, and I also faced production of a large number of prints for an exhibition at the Jameson Gallery at Duke at the end of November. The exhibit, titled Madison County Stories, presented new views of mountain life from myself, Duke University students, and Madison Middle School girls. The students had all participated in the Spring Creek Literacy Project; a summer program with the Duke students acting as mentors to the middle-schoolers in storytelling, writing, and photography. It was a big exhibit – 43 of my prints and 146 student pieces – and while my work was finished and ready to hang, the student work was still in the editing phase and had to be printed and put behind glass. But despite the loss of a week due to the computer repair, and some timely help from Kyndall and MaryRose, we got it finished and down to Durham on the Monday after Thanksgiving. It took us three and a half days to hang it, and the process was not without it’s own drama and intricate mathematical equations. The show looked wonderful and the opening was a big success and well attended. My friends Debbie Chandler and Denise O’Sullivan, who are Dellie’s grandchildren and noted ballad singers in their own right, sang and pretty much stole the show.

 

Kelsey, Paw Paw Creek, Madison County, NC, 2012, from Madison County Stories.

                              Top, Denise Norton O'Sullivan Singing in the Barn, Sodom Laurel, Madison County, NC, 1976, from SodomSong.

 Bottom, Debbie Norton Chandler Dancing at the Eno River Festival, Durham, NC, 1976, from SodomSong.

 

I can’t say enough good things about Jamie Paul. In addition to the great work he's been doing with me for the last eighteen months, he's also found time to produce a CD of his music, Let It Mend, which will be available for purchase beginning February 5th at jamiepaulmusic.com.

 

We decided on a quick turnaround and moved the show to Marshall for a January 18 opening reception at the Madison County Arts Council. Here, the exhibit presented different hanging challenges, and more limited space. Most importantly though, it offered the opportunity to present the work in the place it was created with the individual “artists” and their families in attendance. The reception was packed - teachers and administrators from the school system, politicians, and other members of the community, many of whom were in the photographs. It became more Homecoming than Art Exhibit, highlighted by the student's pride in seeing their work on the gallery walls.

Top, left, Kristina Dixon, right, Cassidy Belcher. Bottom, left, Brittany Norton, right, Makalah Creaseman.

All students are from Madison County Middle School.

It’s good to have work. Assignments, lectures, exhibits, and grants pay bills and provide time to work on personal projects. I’m very fortunate to get to do what I do and I’m grateful for it. Additionally, my work often takes me out to the wider world, to places and with people I would not normally have the chance to see or meet. Throughout my career, photography has provided open windows to diverse, beautiful, inspiring places. I love that that is the case. These trips help me understand that people everywhere are much the same – kind, generous, and helpful – while also possessing strong differences of opinion, speech, and manner. We live on a wildly diverse planet in a wildly tumultuous time. It would seem that flexibility, tolerance, and an ability to adapt will play increasingly important roles in our lives.

Absent # 1

I have been mostly absent from this site since the end of October and I apologize for my longer-than-anticipated leave. Jamie, the young man who works with me, has counseled me about the pitfalls of electronic media. Rule # 1 is not to be absent from your site for very long because people will forget about it, and you. I’ve broken this first, elemental rule.

But in my own defense, it’s been a busy, hectic stretch of time. It began in mid-September with a weeklong trip to Kentucky and Mississippi for the American Forest Foundation. In three different locations, I photographed landowners who participate in the American Tree Farm System, picturing their involvement with their land and forests. Near Bardstown, Kentucky, I spent the day with two Trappist monks, Brothers Conrad and Bartholomew, at the Abbey of Gethsemani. We spoke at length of faith and forests as we walked and rode through the 2,600-acre tree farm they share with other resident monks. At one time over 270 monks lived at the monastery and it operated as a farm, producing most of what the monks consumed, as well as, world-famous fruitcake and cheeses. With fewer than 50 monks now, the farm mostly produces trees, which are managed for production and retreat. The Abbey was home to the Catholic scholar and writer, Thomas Merton, who I know from my Catholic youth. It was an honor to see his home and the spot that inspired much of his writing.

 Top, The wall of Thomas Merton's House. Bottom, left, Brother Conrad, right, Brother Bartholomew. 

That six-day trip was followed soon thereafter by a presentation at Wake Forest University. My talk and accompanying exhibition in the University Library was part of a larger event surrounding the screening of the film, Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County. The film, by Kim Dryden and Joe Cornelius, looks at the evolution of a cappella ballad singing, for which Madison County is a source community. Sheila Kay Adams, the county’s gifted balladeer, storyteller, and writer, is the protagonist in the film and an old friend. I came to the project through my early (ca. 1970s) photographs of singers and musicians in the Sodom community of Madison County, some of which are used in the film, and my continued documentation of the county’s lifestyle and changes, including images of music and the arts.

 Sheila Kay Adams, Sodom, Madison County, NC, 1975, from SodomSong.

From Winston-Salem, I continued on to Duke University and a series of classes, workshops, and lectures as part of my role as a Visiting Artist for the current school year. One of the lectures was at Perkins Library in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Library has a significant archive of documentary photography and will eventually house my archive. It’s a perfect venue – small (seats 75,) intimate, couches and comfortable chairs, and good sound – and it was full with a nice mix of students, faculty, and staff. My talk was titled, Bloody Madison, ShatterZone, and the Jewel of the Blue Ridge, and looked at the demographic, cultural, and environmental evolution of Madison County.

 

 Greg Mosser Singing at Jamie Paul's Birthday Party, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 2010, from ShatterZone.

I returned home for about eight days and then left on a ten-day trip for the Forest Foundation. This trek took me to the northeast and work with another group of tree farmers. My first stop was with Mike and Vivien Fritz who live just west of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on a beautiful piece of land they’ve groomed with twenty-five miles of cross country ski and snowshoe trails that are open to their entire community for use.

From the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, I drove through the White Mountains in New Hampshire that boast Mt. Washington, second only to North Carolina’s Mt. Mitchell as the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River, and onto the North Family Farm in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Tim Meeh and Jill McCullough’s place had been part of the original Canterbury Shaker Village that dated back to 1792 and the landscape remained rich with the Shaker’s presence – stone walls and boundary markers, mill traces. Tim’s father bought the place in 1950 and it has been a family farm since then. Tim and Jill make syrup from 2,000 tapped maples, sell hay and firewood, and operate completely by wind and solar power. I stayed in their basement apartment for two nights and we found much in common from our present lives, as well as, a shared past from the late sixties and early seventies. It is so nice to be on the road and wind up in a place where you immediately feel at home.

 

Top, Tim Meeh & Jill McCullough. Bottom left, Replacing sap lines, right, their barn.

From the Shaker Village, I drove across New Hampshire, which isn’t very far, to visit with Ben and Debbie Kilham on their Tree Farm near Lyme. The Kilham’s also make maple syrup, and operate a small saw mill, but Ben is mosly noted for his work with orphaned black bear cubs. He is the state’s certified bear rehabilitator and often has as many as twenty bear cubs roaming in a fenced eight-acre lot behind his house. This stop featured my first, and probably last, opportunity to have a 100-pound cub rubbing its back against my chest. Ben is doing amazing work with orphaned cubs, all of which are released into the wild, and his long-term studies of black bear behavior have broken new ground in our understanding of these incredible creatures that, as Ben’s research has discovered, share more traits with humans than one might imagine. 

 

 Top, Ben & Debbie Kilham, Middle, left, Discovering a bear den while in the woods marking trees, right, Ben and his sister, Phoebe, walking to the food plot, Bottom, Ben feeding his cubs.

http://www.forestfoundation.org/

www.monks.org/

northfamilyfarm.com/

http://www.robamberg.com/galleries/sodomsong/

Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County

http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/

http://www.benkilham.com/Benkilham.com/HOME_PAGE.html

http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/

This post will be followed in a couple of days by "Absent #2."

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.