Waves of Trees in Snow, 2009: Tim Barnwell Print of the Month

"Waves of Trees in Snow, 2009" copyright by Tim Barnwell,
used by permission

(click on image for larger view)

I want this photograph. It reminds me of the more remote ridges and hollows in Pennsylvania where I grew up and of backcountry areas in West Virginia (the areas without mountaintop removal coal mining looming high above, ready to bury the valley with debris from the overburden and pollute the groundwater). Because this is one of Tim Barnwell’s photographs, I suspect it was taken further south in Appalachia. If you are a long time reader of my blog, you know that I've written about his work in the past, which you can read here and here.

Barnwell’s photographs capture the landscape of my home, of my roots. And when I look at the rise and fall of the ridges and the contours of the snowy mountains surrounding that homestead, I am transported. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in one of her novels (possibly it was in We Were the Mulvaneys) that we never escape the landscape of our childhood. She was talking about the emotional landscape as well as the physical landscape. Barnwell's image "Waves of Trees in Snow, 2009" evokes a strong emotional response for me: homesickness for how it feels to live nestled in the mountains; amazement at the pristine beauty; concern that this beauty will be lost; and admiration for Barnwell's artistry.

I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing Barnwell's work in exhibition, but I own a copy of one of his three books, On Earth's Furrowed Brow. Those images had the power to make me cry in the bookstore as I paged through the book for the first time. Although the price of a print of one of the images published there is beyond my means (Barnwell's photographs are included in the collections of several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum), Barnwell has launched a new "Print of the Month" program that is a wonderful opportunity for anyone who is serious about collecting fine art photography but has limited budget. "Waves of Trees in Snow, 2009" is the first photograph to be offered as a print of the month, and it is available until March 31, 2011 – which just happens to be the timeframe when I'll see another birthday come and go. Last year I received a Bill Scheele photograph of Levon Helm for my birthday. This year, I'm thinking a Barnwell photograph would be a nice addition to our collection.

Here is the description from Barnwell's website of how the new program works: "The Print of the Month Program is designed to introduce collectors to new, previously unpublished, images by master photographer and printer Tim Barnwell. We are able to offer special initial pricing, as these images are not available through galleries until after they rotate out of the Print of the Month (POM) program." These are limited edition photographs (a maximum of thirty photographic reproductions will be made), and each is mounted, matted, signed and numbered. The price is $295 during the time the print is offered as a print of the month selection. Print size is 11x14 (prints of this size are normally priced at $600 for unpublished images and $1200 for images published in his three books). For an additional $35, framing is available (black metal 16x20 frame, with Plexiglas). More details and ordering information are available at his website.

I'm looking forward to seeing what images will be offered in the future through the Print of the Month program, but this first one has the power to make me a little misty around the eyes, in the same way that the images in On Earth's Furrowed Brow do. It’s the topology that does it. In the prologue to An American Childhood, Annie Dillard writes, “When everything else has gone from my brain – the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family – when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

Bio:
Tim Barnwell is a commercial and fine arts photographer based in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the author of three books, The Face of Appalachia, On Earth's Furrowed Brow, and Hands in Harmony. His fine art photography has been exhibited widely and his images have appeared in dozens of magazines including Time, Newsweek, Southern Accents, House Beautiful, American Craft, Outdoor Photographer, Sky and Telescope, US Air, Blue Ridge Country, U.S. News and World Report, Billboard, Travel South, American Style, Black & White Magazine, LensWork, and National Parks.

Photo Credit: "Waves of Trees in Snow, 2009" copyright by Tim Barnwell, used by permission

Meredith Sue Willis: Out of the Mountains

Meredith Sue Willis is one of those writers whose work is often overlooked – perhaps because she has been labeled as an Appalachian writer. There’s a tendency to categorize writers and books by region or genre, but the result can be limiting in unintended ways. “Appalachian writer” is a term I’ve often used myself to draw attention to the works of writers I admire from that mountain region. But it seems that there may be a stigma associated with being classified as “Appalachian” which lends itself to some widely held stereotypes about mountain people. Why does “Appalachian writer” not have the same cachet as, say, “Southern writer?” After all, Appalachia is a big place and reaches as far south as Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Just as geographic regions can overlap, so can literary genres. A bestselling mystery or legal thriller can also be literary fiction. And, an Appalachian writer can also be many other things as well – including a Southern writer (Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith immediately come to mind).

In the afterword to her new book, Meredith Sue Willis writes, “This collection is called Out of the Mountains because that is where the stories come from, and so do I. . . . One of my projects in writing these stories has been to wonder, with so much slipping into the past, what is still unique about our region. I am also interested in what Appalachians retain and take along when they leave home – when they go out of the mountains – and also what Appalachian attitudes and insights contribute to the larger culture.”

I started reading Meredith Sue Willis’ work nearly a decade ago when one of her short stories had been submitted to me when I was the fiction editor of the literary journal Paper Street. I wanted to publish that piece, but the editor of another journal beat me to it. I was glad to see the main character of that story also appear in several of the stories in Out of the Mountains. In this collection of a dozen stories, characters sometimes reappear in several stories so that the reader sees them at various time points and from different perspectives. However, these are not linked stories. What does connect the stories is a sense of displacement and restlessness – insiders who leave the mountains to live elsewhere and outsiders who come to the mountains. There’s a tension between belonging and not belonging, of insider vs. outsider, of rural vs. urban, of traditional customs vs. new ways.

The cover photograph was taken by my husband, Kevin Scanlon. Both Kevin and I had contributed work to the 2008 “West Virginia Issue” of Hamilton Stone Review which Willis edited. Since Willis was familiar with Kevin’s series of West Virginia photographs, she later requested some of his images for consideration as possible covers for this short story collection. At the time we were curious about why she chose the one she selected, and after reading the stories I now understand how well it fits. These are stories with unexpected juxtapositions and clashes which show the changing culture.

Willis writes, “A great beauty of fiction, of course, is that it can be about many things at once . . . . I consider fiction to be a mutual, human grace – to know people we’ll never meet, beliefs we’ll never hold, experiences we’ll never have in our actual lives. It’s what I read for, and why I write.”

Meredith Sue Willis is the author of sixteen books and she teaches creative writing at New York University, School of Professional and Continuing Studies. She also maintains several blogs: Literature and the Web, Online Journal, as well as Resources for Writers. Two of her books have been published this year: Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel (Montemayor Press) and the short story collection Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories (Ohio University Press).

Upcoming appearances include the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston, West Virginia, October 16th – 17th at the Charleston Civic Center and the Kentucky Book Fair, November 13th.

Mountain Cemeteries: Decoration Day

[Note: During the summer months posting will be far less frequent, most likely one post per month, so that I can focus on another writing project. Weekly posts will resume in September, after Labor Day.]

Marker at Kayford Mountain Cemetery
(Copyright 2008 by Dory Adams)

I was taught to remember the dead and grew up watching my elders place wreaths and flowers on family graves for Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Christmas. However, the most important day for tending to family graves was Decoration Day, which was what we called Memorial Day when I was a young girl. In much of Appalachia, Decoration Day was a remembrance of ancestors, not just about honoring those who had died while serving in the military. Flags decorated the graves of fallen soldiers, and flowers decorated the graves of family members.

There is some concern that the meaning of Memorial Day has been lost since the traditional observance date of May 30th was moved to the last Monday of May in 1971. When the National Holiday Act created a three-day weekend, the focus of Memorial Day gradually shifted to weekend getaways and family cookouts – a summer kickoff of sorts.

For me, Memorial Day has always been about all those things – cemeteries, fallen soldiers, the beginning of summer, kin and cookouts. Only the language has changed: Decoration Day, The 30th of May, Memorial Day. My maternal family is from the small towns nestled in the hills of Huntingdon County in Pennsylvania, and my great-grandparents, grandparents, and assorted aunts and uncles are buried in the mountain cemeteries there. On Memorial Day, in the town of Three Springs where my grandfather lived, people would gather flowers from their gardens and meet at the town green to form a procession where they carried the flowers to the cemetery. It wasn’t exactly a parade as there was no band, but there may have been a drummer on occasion to provide a cadence. Grandpap always cut rosebuds from the bush in his front yard on the morning of May 30th for me to carry and place on the graves of Grandma and Sarah Alice, their youngest daughter who’d died at birth. He carried flowers for the graves of his parents and for his brother Alfred who’d been killed in World War II. Following a small service in the cemetery, a trumpeter would play Taps, and then we’d walk across the cemetery to place our flowers at the gravesites.

Later that day, everyone seemed to gather at my grandfather’s house. Carloads of out-of-town relatives would arrive. There would be a backyard cookout and the house would fill up with aunts and uncles and cousins. When every lawn chair, porch swing, and porch banister was taken, blankets would be spread on the ground so people could sit on the lawn without getting grass stain on their clothes. People came and went all day long, and if you paid attention to the grownups talking you were bound to pick up a family story or two. My great-aunts loved to tell stories of their brother’s (my grandpap) mischief as a boy, so I know all about whose pigtails he scorched with a match, and how he caught a fish with his bare hands when jumping into the creek in his Sunday suit on the way home from church, and how he rode his new sled down the stairs at the farm on Christmas morning. The stories of Uncle Alfred were told in a different tone of voice, more hushed and with sadness filling up the silent gaps.

Reading Lee Maynard’s The Pale Light of Sunset got me thinking about mountain cemeteries again. Although I’m not from West Virginia, the kinship I feel with West Virginia writers began when I first read Chuck Kinder’s work, and has continued as I’ve read the work of other West Virginia writers. In the opening chapter of The Pale Light of Sunset, Lee Maynard wrote of being born in his grandmother’s parlor, and of learning fifty years later of the birth of a stillborn aunt, his mother’s twin, who’d also been born in that same parlor. Maynard writes: “There was no money for tiny burials. In the stillness and quiet of a black summer night, with waves of heat pouring down the valley and out across the rivers in the distance, with the heavy scent of honeysuckle hanging in the night air, the tiny body was named, wrapped in my grandmother’s prized quilt, and buried in a hand-dug grave beneath the tall grass just beyond the vegetable garden. Beneath the tall grass where I played.” Many years later after living most of his life in the southwest, he returns to where the house once stood in the West Virginia mountains, but the house and everything that he knew there was gone. He writes: “I lie down in the grass and stare upward into a pale steel sky. And I realize that, had I, too, been stillborn, I would lie here, too, forever, next to an aunt whose name I never knew. Under the grass.”

I remember slowly closing the book and putting it down after reading that opening chapter, too moved by and connected to those words to read any further just then. I thought of my mother telling me about a baby buried under a rosebush on my great-grandparents’ farm. She wasn’t sure whose baby it was as it had happened long ago; no doubt in a similar situation to what Lee Maynard writes of when there was no money for tiny burials. I suppose the rosebush was planted later to mark the spot, but Mom always phrased it as “the baby buried under the rosebush at the farm.” Everyone was born at home back then, including her. It was a grim irony that the first of her family to be born in a hospital would be her baby sister, strangled by the umbilical cord which had become wrapped around her neck in the birth process. It was to her grave that I carried those rosebuds on Memorial Day.

Red poppies are supposed to be the flower of remembrance for war dead, but roses have become a flower of remembrance for me, starting with those deep pink roses from my grandfather’s yard. It may even go back to that rosebush on my great-grandfather’s farm. In my own garden there are white roses planted in memory of a dear friend who died far too young of cancer. In fact, when we moved to the house where we now live, that rosebush came with us, transplanted from the yard at the old house. Just last week, my husband set a new stake into the ground to help support the branches which are heavy with white buds and blossoms. There are also poppies in my garden, but they are orange poppies and not the “In Flanders Field” red poppies meant for soldiers, planted because I remember them growing in Grandma’s garden when I was barely three years old and the orange blossoms seemed almost as tall as me.

In Chuck Kinder’s first novel, Snakehunter, one of the characters, an aunt, is determined to make sure all the family graves have tombstones marking them. After forty years of putting headstones on family graves, she manages to get the final stone set on her brother’s grave in a West Virginia hillside cemetery on Decoration Day 1950. The day is spent getting the new granite marker up the hill on a washed-out and deeply rutted dirt road to the family gravesite, and then pulling weeds and tending to the other family graves there. I think of this story every time I visit a mountainside graveyard, and of two West Virginia cemeteries in particular, the Hatfield Cemetery and the Kayford Cemetery.

Hatfield Cemetery, copyright 2006 by Kevin Scanlon

In the Hatfield cemetery in Logan County, West Virginia, the graves go all the way up the steep hillside to the woods, and some of the older graves at the top are actually in the woods now. At the center of the cemetery is the Hatfield family plot where a marble statue of the patriarch, Devil Anse, dominates. In contrast to this formal plot are the more humble graves further up the hillside, some with handmade wooden markers, others marked by rocks with hand-chiseled names and dates. We tend to think of a marked grave as a permanent memorial, but it’s impossible to stand in such a hillside cemetery and not notice how the wilderness reclaims those graves if left untended.

Hatfield Cemetery, copyright 2006 by Kevin Scanlon

The old cemetery atop Kayford Mountain is now practically surrounded by a mountain top removal mine site there. The dirt road up to the cemetery is deeply rutted, which make it impassable to all but four-wheel drive vehicles. As we walked the rest of the way up after driving as far as we could, I wondered How do they ever get funeral processions and caskets up here for burials? While most of the graves there are very old, there are also a few recent graves with new granite markers. It’s an odd juxtaposition of the cemetery and the mine site, the land defying human attempts to claim it along the washed out dirt road, yet destroyed beyond belief by humans and mining corporations blasting away just beyond the graveyard.

Kayford Mountain Cemetery, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams

The cemetery where my grandparents are buried is in a more pastoral setting, at the edge of town and surrounded by a gated stone wall separating it from the adjacent hill farms, the coal long ago mined from the region before the era of extreme strip mining. My mother and a cousin make sure there are flowers on the family graves for the holiday observances, particularly Memorial Day. It gives me a sense of peace knowing my ancestors are at rest in their mountain cemetery while I remember the dead my own way, planting flowers of remembrance in my own garden here in the city.

Photo Credits:

• Top and bottom photographs: Kayford Mountain Cemetery, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams

• Middle photographs: Hatfield Cemetery, copyright 2006 by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved, used by permission

Other News:

• June 1st marks the first anniversary of In This Light.

• During the summer months, posting will be far less frequent (most likely one post per month) so that I can focus on another writing project. Weekly posts will resume in September, after Labor Day.

Cold Comfort: Maggie Anderson's poems on the photography of Walker Evans

I keep coming back to the photographs of Walker Evans: Appalachia and the South, farms and farmers, steel mills, graveyards, signs, churches, small towns and main streets, living rooms and porches, New York City street scenes and subway riders. These are the same iconic subjects recurrent in my own writing. Well, not the New York City subway and street scenes. Except for a long ago train trip from Chicago to Boston that involved changing trains there, New York City is outside my experience. All I really know of it is what I’ve seen in photographs and movies and books.

In last week’s post, I mentioned Philip Gefter’s essay “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” which explores the truthfulness of photographs. I’ve never questioned the truthfulness of Evans’ photographs or that they are purely documentary. In fact, a common criticism of Evans’ work is that it’s too clinical. However, in reading James R. Mellow’s biography Walker Evans, I came across some information about Evans’ approach to his subjects that made me uncomfortable. Walker Evans sometimes went to elaborate lengths to conceal his photographic intent.

For his New York City subway series, Evans used a concealed camera strapped on under his overcoat with the lens poking out between the front buttons and a cable release threaded down the sleeve to trip the shutter. He was also fond of using an angled viewfinder which enabled him to photograph someone who was standing on the periphery. While it appeared to onlookers that Evans was photographing something in front of him, he was actually shooting in a different direction off to the side. To further his ruse, he often had a companion pretend to pose in front of the camera for the picture he wasn’t taking. I’m not quite sure why this bothers me since it ostensibly allowed him to document what was happening without altering or interfering with the scene – which is the key element of true documentary photography. As Gefter wrote, “As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed.”

I’m beginning to question whether Evans’ camera actually did alter the scene. It’s the eyes of his subjects that unsettle me – their curiosity, the questioning stares. Were these people standing on the sidelines? Were they caught up in watching him at work, not realizing they were his subjects? Did the presence of the camera attract their attention, creating an odd twist to the observer vs. the observed?

In the summer of 1935, Evans spent several months photographing in West Virginia and Pennsylvania when he was one of the photographers working on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project under Roy Stryker. Poet Maggie Anderson’s family was from Rowlesburg, WV, which is one of the towns Evans photographed. Anderson wrote a series of poems about Walker Evans and his West Virginia photographs, included in her 1986 poetry collection, Cold Comfort, which was published fifty years after Evans’ photographs.

Maggie Anderson was born in New York City where her parents worked as teachers, and every summer they traveled to West Virginia – home. In a wonderful interview with Kate Long for the radio series “In Their Own Country,” Anderson described these trips to West Virginia and how she felt freer in Rowlesburg where there were more outdoor places for a child to play than in New York City, and where she was surrounded by cousins and extended family. In response to a question in Kate Long’s interview about whether she “has it in for Walker Evans,” Anderson said, “I guess I sort of do have it in for him” but later goes on to say “he’s a wonderful photographer.” Maggie explained that there was something about Evans’ stance that made her feel protective of the people he photographed, and that Evans “couldn’t know them the way I did.” She emphasized that she wasn’t saying he didn’t have a right to make the photographs – just that he couldn’t possibly see or know those people as she does.

When asked if she’d like to look at and discuss some photographs for this blog article, Maggie respectfully declined, saying she preferred to let the poems speak for themselves and that she feels she’s said all she has to say about Evans’ photographs. I can certainly understand wanting to let the work speak for itself. They are strong and beautiful poems, the language as visual as any photograph, so that readers form their own idea of how the photograph looks.

My own feelings are somewhat mixed since I’ve stood on both sides of the camera, and for all I know I’ve been captured standing off to the side unaware as well. I understand a photographer wanting to document what he or she sees, and there could be an argument made that the angled viewfinder allowed Evans to make a purely documentary image. I see nothing wrong with shooting from the hip in a public place. It’s the elaborate subterfuge Evans employed that bothers me, and I’m not sure that the resulting images weren’t influenced by the presence of the camera in a different way. In some cases it may be that the intent and curious expressions on the faces of his subjects are because they are watching the photographer with interest, thinking they are watching him take a photograph of someone or something else.

If the people and places Evans had photographed were of my own family and home, I would feel protective of them too. But, there’s just enough distance for me to appreciate Evans’ photographs because they are of another place, of other people – even though those people are very much like the people and place where I come from. Distance equals comfort. And Evans pierced the comfort zone of the people in the West Virginia towns of Rowlesburg, Terra Alta, Morgantown, and Reedsville.

For me, it’s an interesting juxtaposition of work by two artists I admire. Walker Evans’ photographs show the outer experience, a limitation of the photographic art form by its nature. Maggie Anderson’s poetry peels back the exterior to reveal the emotional interior of personal territory in a way that language does best. While I still regard Evans’ photographs with great admiration, Anderson’s poetry alters the distance with which I now view them.

Photo Credits:

Top: “Main Street, Morgantown, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34376.

Bottom: “Independence Day, Terra Alta, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF3301-009002-M1.

Appalachian Images: Tim Barnwell (part 2), “In the Garden”

(click on photos to enlarge)

I’ve been thinking lately about how Appalachia is shown and perceived. The Appalachian Mountains cover a large geographic area, but typically people tend to think of southern Appalachia when hearing that word. One of the things I’ve been grappling with is the limits and boundaries that define documentary photography. I expected to be able to see a distinctly drawn line, but instead I detect smudges and gaps. Sometimes the problem seems to be rooted in how a particular photographer self-labels his or her work, claiming it is documentary when in fact they have altered or manipulated the scene to some extent. A wonderful essay, “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” by Philip Gefter, on the New York Times blog “Lens” a few weeks ago explored this difference and used some very famous photographs as examples.

There was never any doubt for me that Tim Barnwell’s fine art photographs in his book On Earth’s Furrowed Brow are the work of a documentarian. In the introduction Barnwell writes, “As I have traveled back roads in search of photographs, I have tried to avoid romanticizing this older way of life.” He states that his intent was to show traditional farm life “and its intersection with modern life.”

In my last post I wrote of how Barnwell’s series of “Sunday” photographs resonated with me. Another of the visual threads in his book that I strongly connected with was that of gardens. His photographs cued up memory images of the gardens I grew up with – the garden in the backyard at my grandparents’ home, and the one in the backyard of my childhood home which my dad planted.

My grandfather’s entire backyard garden was filled with zinnias, except for a narrow strip along the edge of the yard where he grew a few peppers and squash. After he no longer had my grandmother there to garden with, big harvests of sweet corn and beans and potatoes seemed not to interest him. He was more content with growing the long-blooming and colorful zinnias, which he placed on her grave every Sunday after church in summer.

My dad planted a vegetable garden each year right up until he died. He had grown up on a farm and although he’d spent forty years working in a factory, he was always a farmer at heart. He planted sweet corn, pumpkins, beans, potatoes, and tomatoes in his garden, which was located at the back edge of our property adjacent to a wooded ridge on Jacks Mountain. Each year he tried a few new things, such as watermelon and cantaloupe.

My younger brothers and I had chores associated with the garden. We helped with the cultivating and the watering, but our real job was the picking. Mom spent every August canning, the kitchen steamy and sweltering for weeks at a time. Canning jars filled the kitchen table and countertops during that process. My brothers and I spent hours and hours snapping green beans to help her prepare them for canning, and my youngest brother still complains about having to pick all those green beans.

My dad’s garden tools looked much like the ones in Barnwell’s photograph of Gladson Cutschall preparing his garden. Dad took meticulous care of his tools, and I have as many memory images of him carefully cleaning his tools after use before putting them away as I do of him toiling in his garden. Some of those tools had been handed down to him by his father, and now they belong to my brothers.

Saturdays were Dad’s gardening days, and he started in the early morning before the heat. In the evening he’d return to the garden to water it, and we all helped carry water, toting it in buckets and five-gallon watering cans. I can still feel how the soft lawn felt under my feet, hear the crunch of driveway gravel as I crossed it after filling pails at the outside spigot, feel the rise of the earth on the gentle slope up to the garden as the weight of those watering cans made my arms ache, and hear the dogs barking with excitement at the activity. The reward for all that work was the harvest, measured by jars of canned vegetables in rows on the shelves in the basement and the bin filled with potatoes to see us through the winter.

Tim Barnwell turns a compassionate eye on Appalachia. It’s his home. He’s artfully documenting what he sees, and it’s clear that he loves and respects the land and people there. His images of the farms and people of the mountains of North Carolina capture the same activities I witnessed in my own rural upbringing on Jacks Mountain in central Pennsylvania. Even though I’ve lived in the city for decades now, I still miss the rhythm of the planting and harvest seasons, and each time I visit back home I pay particular attention to the crops in the fields and what’s growing in people’s gardens. I don’t have any photographs of my own father working in his garden, but Tim Barnwell’s photograph of Gladson Cutshall preparing his garden for planting is almost close enough.

Photo credits:

All photographs copyright © by Tim Barnwell, used by permission.

Top: Bertha Marler shelling beans, 1983. Marshall, Madison County, NC. Copyright © Tim Barnwell, used by permission

Bottom: Gladson Cutshall, preparing garden, 1983. Shelton Laurel, Madison County, NC. Copyright © Tim Barnwell, used by permission.