During the early 1980s, the Johnny Cash band, which included Marty Stuart, played a benefit at the Holy Rosary School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Stuart felt an immediate and strong kinship with the Lakota people he met there. He noticed how their observing traditional ceremonies and rituals elevated their dignity and spirits. In the late 1980s, Stuart saw Edward S. Curtis’s photograph Vanishing Race—Navaho, circa 1904, in which a group of Navajos on horseback file into a canyon with one lone figure turned to look back. Stuart realized he also had the perspectives of immediacy and hindsight. With the Lakota tribe, Stuart is not a voyeur but the keeper of an inside view. His compassionate images of the Lakota people are akin to social documents by Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Mary Ellen Mark. For decades, Stuart has revisited South Dakota not just to photograph the people but also to donate time and resources to help alleviate the crushing cycle of poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism there. For his efforts, he has been adopted officially into the Lakota tribe. In a body of work he refers to as “Blue Line Hotshots,” Stuart chronicles ordinary people doing ordinary things. In the era before GPS, we consulted road maps that marked the highways and roads in blue, red, or gray. As a chronicler of people who reside along the blue lines, Stuart champions people, who are hotshots
Father and Son, 2012, Pine Ridge, South Dakota
in their own back yards, with empathy and respect. Stuart is an insider among the regional characters he encounters at rodeos, state fairs, and truck stops. After all, Stuart was a star-struck, vulnerable kid himself in 1970, when he borrowed his mother’s camera and approached recording artist Connie Smith and asked if he could take a photograph of her seated behind the steering wheel of her car in a blue-sequined dress. Twenty-six years later Stuart and Smith married. Marty Stuart is a singer-songwriter, musician, performer, historian, collector, writer, entrepreneur, and photographer. His forays into photography blossomed early and never waned. He has created a world of wonder and preserved it at the same time. Being a Marty Stuart fan is its own reward. At a live performance, one is dazzled by his virtuosity as an entertainer, musician, and fan. His joie de vivre is irrepressible and infectious, a visceral reminder to live in the moment and preserve that moment whenever possible.
Sir Cordell Kemp, 2000, Defeated Creek, Tennessee
American Ballads: The Photographs of Marty Stuart will be on exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, May 9 through November 2. For more information visit www.fristcenter.org and www.martystuart.net.
58 | May 2014 NashvilleArts.com