Seldom Scene - At the Rock Cafe, 1979

At the Rock Cafe, Marshall, Madison County, NC 1979

This photograph was made under the auspices of a Photographic Survey Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts awarded to me through Mars Hill College. Prints from the grant period are now housed at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. This was a period of time when our leaders and our citizens understood the role the Arts and Humanities play in our lives. They teach us about life itself - knowledge increasingly threatened by the present political and social climate in our country.  

 

Digging John Henderson's Grave

  

 

John Henderson at Home, Big Pine, 1978

I almost didn’t recognize him in the grocery store. After I moved from the community four years earlier, I lost touch with many of my neighbors on Big Pine – John Henderson among them. There were a couple of years before my divorce and move when I saw John most every day - helping him with tobacco, mostly, but also socializing together on many occasions. He was older, a local man, a tobacco farmer who was also a substitute driver at the post office. During World War Two he was in an engineer battalion at the Battle of the Bulge, in front of the front lines. He was tough, strong man with unlimited stamina. He enjoyed hanging out with the new people in the community, the hippies, and he loved to work.

But here in the grocery store was a spent man – his face and frame gaunt and hollow, while his stomach extended like a ripe melon. He would have been about 70 years old then, not young after a lifetime of work, but he moved with the gait of someone beat down. It had been some years since we had spoken and I asked what was going on with him. “It’s the cancer,” he said. “They say I likely got it from all that sprayin’ I did for the tobacco and other stuff. All them chemicals.” It wasn’t long after that conversation that I got word he had died.

 

Digging John Henderson's Grave, Big Pine, 1988

A group of men gathered at the graveyard one morning to dig his grave. It’s a very precise endeavor, grave digging, and there were men there who knew how to do it – the squaring and leveling, and the deliberate work of digging. Others stood around talking, waiting their turn at the shovel. The talk was of John and his commitment to the community. He wasn’t a churchgoing person, but he was always ready to pitch in or lead when something needed doing – kind of an individual neighbors-in-need program. The men talked about that. What they liked about him. His character. Funny stories. Sad stories.

At the Worley Cemetery, Big Pine, 1988

From the left, front, McKinley Massey, Jim Woodruff. Rear, George Marler, Cylde Anderson, Clyde Randall, Randy Fowler, Robert Buckner, Unknown, Alan Payne, Earl Roberts, Jerry Anderson

John would have enjoyed the mix of work and talk and the words being spoken by his neighbors - people he had lived with his entire life. I remember thinking how deeply intimate and spiritual this act was – the digging and handling of the earth John would be buried in. And also, how fortunate we were to live in a place where those rituals remain - men gathering, offering their backs and their memories to John one last time. Funerals remind us of our mortality; grave digging even more so. As everyone gathered for this photograph, we were aware that at some point in the future we, too, would no longer be in the picture, but would only exist in the memories of our friends. 

Dad

 

My father, Robert Warren Amberg, High School Graduation Picture, Chicago, 1935

 

Dad,

I’m a day late with this thank you. I’m sorry. But I born a few days late so I sense you learned early on to wait on me. Thank you for your patience that lasted throughout your lifetime.

Yesterday, on Fathers Day, my oldest, Benjamin, called from work, unable to talk for very long and we made plans to speak later in the week. Kate has been home for a couple of months and she, Shu, and Kelsey fixed a great supper for all of us, our friend Cedric included who is visiting from South Dakota. A great meal and greater evening. I am a fortunate son.

I thought to call you in the middle of the evening, but that, of course, is impossible. It’s been over eleven years now. It’s been an eventful stretch of time, marked most clearly by the evidence of time’s passage on each of our faces, and in our lives. Know that I think of that, and of you, daily.

I mainly just want to thank you for bringing us to the world so that we may make our own imprints on time’s journey. And I want to add that this is a killer tie you are wearing. I trust you are resting well. 

Carrboro Arts Center

Nicholson Gallery Exhibit

Madison County - Past and Present

Photographs by Rob Amberg

                  At Ramsey's Store, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1977

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             At Cricket's Birthday Party, Big Pine, Madison County, NC 2011

As a documentary photographer living and working several decades in Madison County, North Carolina, Rob Amberg has chronicled the lives and stories of people in isolated mountain areas such as Sodom. The photographs exhibited in Madison County - Past and Present include some of Amberg's oldest as well as most recent work demonstrating thechanging culture of Appalachian North Carolina.www.robamberg.com

Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 6-8pm in the Nicholson Gallery

The exhibition runs from June 3-30.

http://www.artscenterlive.org/exhibition/exhibit

The opening reception on June 14 will feature a performance by noted Madison County ballad singer and storyteller Sheila Kay Adams. Adams was just awarded the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is widely considered the highest honor for the Arts in the nation.

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Sheila Kay Adams, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1975

Madison County - A Bloody Jewel

 

Historical Marker, NC Highway 212, Madison County, NC, 2010

Madison County, North Carolina, earned the moniker Bloody Madison in the Civil War, specifically in January 1863, at the well documented, and well remembered, Shelton Laurel Massacre. That terrible and fearful time in our county’s personal past is thankfully long gone. The nickname, however, has stayed with us and some people would say for good reason.

I don’t know if we have more violence and mayhem in Madison than other places of comparable size and demographics, but we certainly have our fair share. Here are a few notable instances from years past. The year before I moved here, 1972, Nancy Morgan, a young VISTA worker, was murdered and left hogtied in her car on Hot Springs Mountain – a case that remains officially unsolved. Five years later, Philip Turpin and Lorenzo Crews murdered two Yancey County men passing through the county on their way to Greenville, Tennessee. The bodies were found some weeks later in an abandoned stone quarry on Highway 208 after the murderers were overheard bragging in a Cripple Creek, Colorado bar about “getting away with murder in North Carolina.” Then there were the elderly Gahagan siblings who were killed in their home near the Belva community and the man who murdered his daughter by feeding her food laced with pesticides. And one only has to look at the weekly arrest report in the newspaper to realize there are people living here, as there are everywhere, who believe violence is the answer to their problems. Wildness and isolation tend to be defining elements for much of Madison County and I think people, non-residents especially, associate those characteristics with the idea of Bloody Madison - a place where people tend to deal with their own problems.

              Convicted Murderers, Phillip Turpin and Lorenzo Crews, being led from the

Madison County Courthouse to the jail, Marshall, 1978.

There has been a concerted effort over the last fifteen years to temper the county’s image and it has since been reborn as The Jewel of the Blue Ridge. This extreme makeover corresponds with the construction and opening of I-26 and efforts to make the county more appealing to developers, small businesses, and new residents; a program that was largely successful until the economic collapse of 2008 altered the dynamic. Since then, most new, gated communities have gone belly up and the initial flood of new people has slowed. One has to wonder if those developers, as they ponder their red-inked balance sheets, or the county itself, as we mourn our bloodied landscape and lost tax revenues, still think of Madison as a jewel.

It’s not that I dislike the name, The Jewel of the Blue Ridge, or what it represents. I know I live in a jewel of a place - safe and comfortable, with generous, welcoming people. But I also know this can be a hard place to live and that it’s not for everyone. A jewel connotes a certain ease, a station in life, that doesn’t quite mesh with our sometimes hardscrabble reality in Madison County.

 Welcome Sign, Highway 25-70 West, near the Ivy River, Madison County, NC, 2013

But Bloody Madison continues to ring true for me - not the mayhem and violence associated with it, but the name itself. It’s a name with guts and character. For me, it speaks of wildness, and isolation, and a certain unknown, or unmapped, quality. We live in an environment where the natural world plays an influential role in our daily lives. Those influences – the air, water, and soil, the quiet, the mountains and forests, and the culture itself – are the Jewel we speak of. They are our reasons for being here. But without care, attention, and an openness to change, or simply because the world can be brutally unforgiving, as it was in 1863, that jewel can be tarnished and dulled, and oftentimes is Bloody.

 

Victims, Phillip Paludan. An excellent book on the Shelton Laurel Massacre.

The Kingdom of Madison, Manley Wade Wellman. Popular history of Madison County.

Mystical Madison - The History of a Mountain Region, Milton Ready. A new non-academic history by Professor Emeritus at UNCA.

Sodom Laurel Album - Rob Amberg

The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia - Rob Amberg

Kate - Twenty-two

 

 

 

Born in the year of the cicadas

Your colicky wails mimicked the shrill cries of the bug

To create a voice unique to our ears, and to the world.

It has been that way ever since.

 

Under the sign of Gemini, on Dylan’s 50th,

We thought -

This is going to be a wild ride.

Ain’t that been the truth.

Too many moments to prove otherwise.

It’s hard to pick a favorite.

 

Perhaps when you were two years old and

You walked away from your mother at the mall.

Only to be found fifteen minutes later,

After the mall had been placed in lockdown,

Talking to two elderly women ten stores away from

Where you’d last been seen.

You never did know a stranger.

 

Or sending Steve Garrison’s mother to the clinic with a nasty bite

When she mistakenly backed you into a corner at daycare.

Or putting poor Leroy the cat in the freezer and

Claiming your brother did it.

Rebar on the soccer field. The last line of defense.

The endless parade of friends and critters brought to the house,

Most of whom, to our joy, are still in our lives.

 

You’re the perfect mix,

Your mother’s calm and nurturing ways.

And your father’s hypersensitivity.

Like mixing yoga and football.

Pensive, moody, fierce, unyielding.

Joyful, expansive, embracing, giving.

At work, it’s always, “May I help you?”

At 22, still figuring when to be which.

And I suppose, which to be when.

It’s a rich journey.

 

Happy Birthday

 

Half Staff

At the Madison County, North Carolina, Courthouse, 2013.

Our flags have been flying at half-staff for many months now and I, like many people, am sickened and saddened by the unrelenting violence in our world. Benghazi, Sandy Hook, and Boston have provided us with a never-ending stream of heroes and innocent victims to be honored and remembered. And honor them we should.

But I find myself equally saddened and distressed by the deaths of people we have chosen not to honor with this same public tribute. I’m thinking here of the thousands of victims of abuse and gun violence, the low-wage factory workers in Bangladesh laboring in unregulated industries so that we may have inexpensive clothing, or the scores of children and families killed in our drone strikes. I wonder if someone, some country, flies a flag at half-staff for these unsung heroes and innocents. 

We Americans believe we are an exceptional people and that we are the force for good in the world. We believe our laws and culture are above reproach and our motives and tactics are always pure and should never be questioned. Why would anyone, or any society, wish us harm?

But I’m reminded of that quote from Galatians 7, Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, which leads me to question our own complicity in this rampant violence being perpetrated on us. Americans are the most heavily armed people in the world. When you couple that fact with our country’s poor mental health care and lax gun laws, you have a potent recipe for havoc. America has been the leading exporter of arms and munitions in the world for many years, and since our beginnings as a nation, violence and warfare have been among our most defining characteristics. Our invasions, interventions, and liberations bring the same indiscriminate death and destruction to innocents. That we do these things in the name of peace, freedom, and democracy matters little to the countries we invade or the families affected by our violence.

Perhaps a more honest response would be for all nations of the world to fly their flags at half staff in perpetuity so that all innocent victims receive the honor and respect they deserve. 

In Weaverville, North Carolina, 2013.

Seldom Scene - EY Ponder

Madison County Sheriff, E Y Ponder (center with tie) and deputies with confiscated marijuana crop, Marshall, Madison County, NC, 1979

In 1979 Madison County was one of the leading producers of marijuana in North Carolina, and the illegal crop was widely reported as the number one cash crop in the state. Madison was also the leading producer of burley tobacco in North Carolina.

Jesus on the Hill

 

Mark and Marisa's new home in Frederick, Maryland.

I recently took a trip up to Maryland to help my younger brother move into his new home. The move was a success. Their new residence is in historic downtown Frederick, Maryland, and was built in 1850 by John Joseph Moran who gained notoriety as the attending physician at Edgar Allen Poe’s death in 1849. I got to spend some time with my two nieces, Lily and Samantha who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and meet Sam’s boyfriend Jake from West Virginia. 

 

 

Left, Lily. Right, Jake and Samantha

While in Maryland I drove over to my old stomping grounds around Langley Park and our Oakview neighborhood in Silver Spring to have a look around. That area of suburban Washington, DC has been changing dramatically and steadily since World War II. When I grew up there, pre-Beltway, there was still a lot of open space and the roads were small and slow. That pastoral landscape is now rolling hills of concrete and development and has been for some time so I wasn’t seeing anything new. What got my attention were things that had stayed the same – specific places and specific memories. 

 

My Grandmother's House on University Boulevard in Silver Spring, Maryland.

While driving over to my old neighborhood just off of New Hampshire Avenue, north of Langley Park, I passed my grandmother’s old house on University Boulevard and decided to stop. When I knocked on the door an elderly Asian woman answered. I was able to communicate to her my relationship with the house that had been in her family for thirty years. She graciously invited me inside, which I refused, but I did walk around the outside, mostly wanting to see the backyard, a scene of many 4th of July parties with my family. My Uncle Charlie’s brick grill was gone, but the yard was as I remembered it; big enough for badminton and croquet, lawn chairs and blankets, the grill, and tables for food. The house itself, almost new when I lived there in the late forties, was now run down and in need of structural repair and paint. And University Boulevard, a slow two-lane road through the 1950s, and still that way in my memory, was now six lanes of unrelenting traffic and sound, made immediate and real by its close proximity to the house.

At the intersection of Piney Branch Road and New Hampshire Avenue, stopped for the traffic light, I looked up on the hill facing me and saw a familiar statue of Jesus, his arms outstretched in a gesture of embrace and protection. Years ago, in maybe 1955, my cousin George and I had been dropped off at the movie theatre in Langley Park for a late afternoon matinee. It was dark when the movie ended and we had been told to wait at the entrance where someone would pick us up. After thirty or forty-five minutes of waiting, and repeated phone calls to a busy single or no answer, we decided to just walk home. It was two miles or less and we knew the way. New Hampshire Avenue in those days was dark and lightly trafficked with no sidewalks or streetlights. By the time we reached Piney Branch road, I was pretty scared and said so to George who was a year older, and in my mind wiser. He suggested I look at the Jesus statue and ask him for strength and comfort. I do recall feeling calmer, at least for a short time, which was about when our parents drove by, saw us, and doubled back to pick us up. George and I could tell pretty quickly the adults were not happy or impressed by our resourcefulness and I do remember Jesus didn’t offer much protection from their wrath when we got back home. Later that year, the statue suffered the wrath of a hurricane and was blown over. It was subsequently moved back on the hill where it has stayed, eternally vigilant, and protected from the wind. 

 

A Tale of Two Pictures

 

I went to a benefit for Donnie Norton a couple of weeks ago at the Walnut Fire Department out on Hwy. 25-70, west of Marshall. Donnie has had some serious health issues over the last couple of years and had to retire from his job as an asphalt roller with APAC.  I’ve known Donnie and his family since 1975 - he is one of Dellie Norton’s great-grandchildren - and I knew everyone would be comfortable with me making photographs.

I especially wanted to make photographs of Donnie with his grandson Elijah, which I did. I was thinking to do a pretty standard portrait, framed tightly with little or no background, both people looking straight into the camera. I was shooting with my digital Canon SLR.

This first photograph is close to ideal – proud grandfather securely holding his tentative grandson. Donnie is a big, broad man, but my distance from him and the focal length of the lens keep him from seeming imposing. It’s a warm image, in both tone and feeling. It’s happy and optimistic and consistent with a classic genre of photographs. It’s been done millions of times and most of us have similar images in our scrapbooks or on our Facebook pages. I knew the family would love it, and they did.

Those situations usually demand a series of exposures. Facial expressions, especially with children, change so quickly that a photographer will generally not rely on a single image. He wants a number of pictures to look at before he chooses the best one. That was my situation with Donnie and Elijah. Eleven frames later, probably less than two minutes, I made this second photograph, which has a totally different feel than the first one.

The obvious difference is I chose to present this second one in black and white. Stripped of the warmth and distraction of the color, the photograph is all emotion. I got closer and tighter, which immediately makes Donnie appear larger than life. With a small tilt of his head, a slightly different camera angle, and dead seriousness of his eyes, he appears ominous. Elijah, sans pacifier, has evolved from tentative to fearful and his grandfather, while still in the same secure posture, now seems to be protecting his grandson from an imminent threat.

What interests me is the camera’s ability to fashion the message from a picture. Virtually nothing had changed about the emotion of the situation from one image to the next. Yet, with only minor alterations in technique and camera placement, a radically different storyline develops, one more powerful and ambivilent than the first. 

We like to think the camera doesn’t lie and I think there is truth to that statement. But I also believe a picture is worth a thousand words and oftentimes those words can be contradictory, not necessarily truthful, or complete regarding any particular situation. 

 

Hero - Wendell Berry

 

I was on staff and freelanced for the Rural Advancement Fund for many years during the 1980s and 1990s. The non-profit, farm advocacy organization had its beginnings during the Great Depression as the National Sharecroppers Fund, and when I began working with them in 1985, they were approaching their fiftieth Anniversary as an active voice for farmworkers and small family farms.

A number of events were created to celebrate the Anniversary and broaden their message. One was a Citizen’s Hearing on Agriculture that was held at US House of Representatives in 1987. One of the citizens was the much-noted author, scholar, activist, and farmer, Wendell Berry. I was photographing the event for RAF and made this photograph of Mr. Berry while he was delivering his testimony. Later, we sent a copy of the print to Berry as a thank you and he used it as the author’s photograph on his novel Remembering.

For those of you who don’t know Wendell Berry and his work, his credentials and accomplishments are near impossible to list. Berry’s 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture was instrumental in my evolution of thought about community and place. It should be required reading for everyone. Wikipedia offers a good accounting of Berry’s life and work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry

I was a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War, one of many thousands of Americans opposed to that war in particular, and all war in general. In 1968, Berry delivered a “Statement Against the War in Vietnam” during the Kentucky Conference on the War and Draft at the University of Kentucky. It was a courageous act in that place and time and continues to resonate today.

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ‘truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

More Feels Right

Troublesome Gap on the Day of My Separation, Madison County, NC, 1983.

I had very thoughtful responses to my blog post of a couple of weeks ago titled “representative.” In the entry, I expressed the difficulty in finding words or pictures that are truly typical or characteristic of Madison County given the diversity that now exists in our mountain community. I suggested that one common thread for the vast majority of residents is the place “just feels right” and that perhaps this is the most accurate and true representation of place.

Grant Trevor, an old friend and long-term newcomer to the county, expressed a concern that what “felt right” about Madison when we moved here decades ago – the isolation, the sense of community, and the sheer beauty – continues to be a part of the place forty years in the future. Pac McLaurin, a photographer and instructor from Valle Crucis who moved to the region fourteen years ago, spoke of the complexity of the words “feels right,” and how it’s different for everyone. He also spoke of the changes occurring in Watauga County that have diminished his own sense of place.

I do a lot of driving with my work. In the past year, I’ve made trips north to New England, south to Florida, west to Kentucky and Arkansas, and east to Winston-Salem and Durham. I enjoyed each of these places, some more familiar than others, and the people I met there. There were elements in each place that felt good, but also things that kept it from being a place I would want to live. The heat, the cold, the bugs, the noise, too many people, too big, can’t see the stars, crummy air and water, too conservative – it’s always a combination of ingredients that keep places from just feeling right.

But driving home from any direction, there are specific points on the highway where things seemingly change – mile marker 75 on I-40 and Sams Gap on I-26, for example. In each of these locations, the air suddenly feels cleaner and crisper, the smell is more alive and vibrant, and my vision is stimulated by the uniqueness of what I’m seeing. It’s a physical and sensual response and my body unconsciously relaxes with the knowledge that I’ve arrived home to my spot. It’s a feeling that has been consistent over my forty years of living here regardless of the changes, both good and bad, that have come to our place.

On Lower PawPaw, Madison County, NC, 2012.