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

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.

Appalachian Images: Tim Barnwell (Part 1), "Sundays"

(click on photos to enlarge)

On a morning in April 2008 when my husband and I were out photographing in Roanoke, Virginia’s Historic City Market District, we stopped to browse in a bookstore there. Cantos Booksellers is a small independent bookstore, the kind with creaky floors and a few chairs among the shelves where you can sit to leisurely page through a book. The cover of one book in particular caught my eye that day – Tim Barnwell’s On Earth’s Furrowed Brow: The Appalachian Farm in Photographs.

I opened Barnwell’s book to find gorgeously reproduced black-and-white images of the hill farms and people in the mountains of North Carolina. These photographs struck such an emotional chord with me that they actually brought tears to my eyes. The photograph that started the waterworks – not the bawling out loud kind, but the throat-tightening silent tears sliding down the face kind of crying – was an image of churchgoers crossing a stream to get to the Sunday worship service. I closed the book and looked around to see if anyone had caught me crying, and then took the book to a more secluded area of the store where I found a seat behind a row of shelves before opening the book again. I turned the pages slowly, examining the images: tobacco fields and churches, farmers and hill farms, homey kitchens and gardens, and front porches that look as inviting as the general stores where folks stop to sit a spell and talk to their neighbors. I sat a long time with that book, caught up in a familiarity that harkened back to my own growing up among rural hill farms in a different part of the Appalachians.

It’s all there in each image, everything that makes a good photograph and a good story – the interesting perspective and light, the artful composition, the sense of place, and interesting characters. There is even an underlying sense of tension that the peaceful scenes depicted are about to change, evoking a sense of loss. And just as in any good story, there are many threads woven together to make the whole. We all bring our own stories to what we read and see, filtering it through our own experience, and one of the threads that stood out for me was Barnwell’s series of “Sunday” images.

The Sundays of my own growing up years were different from the Sundays of today. Sunday mornings were for churchgoing, and Sunday afternoons were for visiting. And somewhere between the morning church service and evening twilight was Sunday family dinner, which usually involved several generations of extended family members. It was the day when we connected with our larger family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Stores were closed on Sunday and no business was conducted except at gas stations, restaurants, and certain markets where you could buy a Sunday newspaper and an emergency quart of milk or loaf of bread. No one even considered doing yard work or chores (with the exception of cooking and dishwashing). The house had been cleaned and there was always some sort of special treat ready in the kitchen to bring out for whoever might stop by. The women tended to gather around the kitchen table, the men in the living room in front of the TV. And in warm weather the front porch swing and the backyard picnic table were the favored spots. At the edges of it all were the children who ran in and out of those kitchens and living rooms, played in the yards and on the porches, listening to and absorbing the stories the adults told.

Times and demands change, and the world moves much faster now, which makes me appreciate Tim Barnwell’s photographs all the more. He’s captured a glimpse of that slower pace and older ways that have long vanished in most places, documenting it through the photographs and the oral histories in this book. You can see more of his images from both of his books at his Website gallery. He has a new book coming out this fall which I’m looking forward to seeing, and he may just drop by here to do a guest post then.

Photo credits

All photographs copyright © by Tim Barnwell, used by permission

Top Photo: Crossing Creek to go to church, 1986. Grapevine, Madison County, NC. Copyright © by Tim Barnwell, used by permission

Middle Photo: Old church in tobacco field, 1981. Big Laurel, Madison County, NC. Copyright © by Tim Barnwell, used by permission

Bottom Photo: Ernest Teague and Ernest Rector, Sunday visit, 1983. Marshall, Madison County, NC. Copyright © by Tim Barnwell, used by permission