CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
DOCUMENT Special issue
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Spring 2013
Document ® a Publication of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University 919-660-3663 | Fax: 919-681-7600 | docstudies@duke.edu | documentarystudies.duke.edu Director: Tom Rankin Associate Director for Programs and Development: Lynn McKnight Publishing Director: Alexa Dilworth Art Director: Bonnie Campbell Communications Coordinator: Elizabeth Phillips Publishing Intern: Joel Mora The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University teaches, engages in, and presents documentary work grounded in collaborative partnerships and extended fieldwork that uses photography, film/video, audio, and narrative writing to capture and convey contemporary memory, life, and culture. CDS values documentary work that balances community goals with individual artistic expression. CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices. CDS conducts its work for local, regional, national, and international audiences. All photographs appearing in Document® are copyright by the artist. | Document® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Cover: Rev. Mitchell and Lisa Spear at a Mt. Zuma baptism in the Flint River, 1977. Photograph by Paul Kwilecki.
FEATURED 3
OTHER NEWS 11
One Place
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
New book, website, and exhibit feature forty years’ worth of images from Decatur County, Georgia, by self-taught photographer Paul Kwilecki
Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates Continuing Ed: Spring Classes and Summer Institutes
First Book Prize in Photography Winner Website and forthcoming book and exhibit feature Gerard H. Gaskin’s images of the African American and Latino house and ballroom community and its celebration of urban gay life
ABOVE: Willis Park, 1976. OPPOSITE: Loggers in the woods, near Attapulgus, 1978. PAGE 4: Sarah Will Harris statue, Oak City Cemetery, 1966. PAGES 6–7: Trailways bus station, 1978. PAGES 8–9: County Farm hog killing, 1983. Photographs by Paul Kwilecki.
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ONE PLACE
Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
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Edited and with an introduction by Tom Rankin, coedited by Iris Tillman Hill
aul Kwilecki was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, in 1928 and died there in 2009. In between, he raised a family, ran the family’s hardware store, and taught himself how to use a camera. During his decades of working on his opus on his home terrain, Paul used different words to describe it—“my project,” a “photographic journal,” and, perhaps most often, a “document.” None of these rather simplistic words and descriptions communicates the nuance of his work; I know of no single body of images with a reach and resonance to match what Paul accomplished in Decatur County. He brought an honest seriousness to the work of picturing home: “I rearrange sacred furniture. Because my brain, not my camera, is my instrument, beauty isn’t enough,” he said. “I’m looking at the subject, not at the surface of the print, though I’m grateful when the surface turns out to be beautiful.” Paul’s approach is passionate, instinctive, personal; he strives toward a coherent aesthetic and cultural document even as he is fully aware that he is driven first by his own interests, his own heart. Paul’s brilliance, ultimately, is his ability to blend these varying impulses together. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he photographed, and the book includes his selected prose. While Paul Kwilecki ranks among the most important American documentary photographers of the twentieth century, he is also one of the least well known. “I don’t make pictures to decorate walls,” he said, knowing full well how often people do. “I make them to shed light in dark corners.” —Tom Rankin, director, Center for Documentary Studies
One Place, the newest book in the Documentary Arts and Culture series, a collaboration between the University of North Carolina Press and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, will be published in April 2013. The Paul Kwilecki Photographs and Papers Collection is held in the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org
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Exhibit One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia March 18–July 27, 2013 Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries Talk by Tom Rankin, with reception and book signing: Thursday, April 25, 6 to 9 p.m.
y documentarystudies.duke.edu/exhibits Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) is the author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia. Tom Rankin directs both the Center for Documentary Studies and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFAEDA) at Duke University. Iris Tillman Hill, former CDS director, is coeditor of the Documentary Arts and Culture series.
ONE PLACE
ONE PLACE Paul Kwilecki and Four
PAUL KWILECKI
Decades of Photographs
and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
from Decatur County, Georgia
Edited by TOM RANKIN
Iris Tillman Hill, former CDS director, is coeditor of the Documentary Arts and Culture series. Documentary Arts and Culture Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University The University of North Carolina Press www.uncpress.unc.edu Jacket photographs by Paul Kwilecki
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“One Place is a deep reflection on one artist’s tilling of the soil at the heart of home, but mostly these words and images are about time, what lasts, what doesn’t.” —NATASHA TRETHEWEY, U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Thrall
“As full of riches as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kwilecki’s sustained portrayal of Decatur County is an American classic.” —ALEC SOTH, photographer and author of From Here to There Edited by TOM RANKIN
“A masterful visual drama of life in the South. Gesture is critical to Kwilecki’s eye, revealing his love for humanity.” —DEBORAH WILLIS, author of Posing Beauty and Reflections in Black
“An epic of ghostly ordinariness.” —ROY BLOUNT JR., author of Long Time Leaving
“There is something downright supernatural about Kwilecki’s accomplishment. . . . One Place is a monumental chronicle of the real, messy, complicated, redeemed, and redeeming American spirit.” —RANDALL KENAN, author of Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Documentary Arts and Culture Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University The University of North Carolina Press www.uncpress.unc.edu
—Paul Kwilecki, excerpted from his essay “Decatur County” in One Place
“One Place is a masterpiece of documentary art.” —ROGER HODGE, editor-in-chief, Oxford American magazine “Once you’ve seen these photographs, you can’t forget the places or the people.” —JULIAN COX, founding curator of photography and chief curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
hough artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) chose to rema in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Deca tur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family’s hardware store. He had always been interested in photography and taught himself how to use a camera. Over fo decades, he documented life in his commun ty, making hundreds of masterful and intima black-and-white prints. Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farm ing, factory work, church life, the courthouse He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than two hundred photographs and selected prose. Paul Kwilecki worked alone, his correspon dence with important photographers his only link to the larger art world. Despite this isola tion, Kwilecki’s work became widely known. “Decatur County is home,” he said, “and I know it from my special warp, having been both nourished and wounded by it.”
unc
press
Printed in China
Tom Rankin directs both the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University.
“These pictures reflect their maker, a man who was fascinated by the subjects he chose, especially the more vulnerable ones and who was an outsider himself, at least by temperament.” —SANDRA S. PHILLIPS, curator of photography, SFMOMA
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“I rearrange sacred furniture. Because my brain, not my camera, is my instrument, beauty isn’t enough. I’m looking at subject, not at the surface of the print, though I’m grateful when the surface turns out to be beautiful.” —PAUL KWILECKI
Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) is the author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia.
document
am frequently asked by people who have not seen my work why I spend my life documenting one simple place like Decatur County, Georgia. People confuse simple with small; they’re not the same thing. There are no simple places or simple lives. The problems Decatur Countians face may be different from the problems of urban life, but they are no less threatening and therefore exacting. Fulfillment and self-respect are as necessary but elusive in Decatur County as elsewhere. I was both nourished and wounded by Decatur County. I know the place like I know myself. Its landscape and prosaic structures comfort me with their familiarity, like a mother cradling a child. Decatur County, like all places, was shaped by its history and geography. Real circumstances are richer than anything we can invent, and photographs made from them have unique credibility and economy. When one searches for a specific image, he blinds himself to everything else. He is apt to let a possible photograph pass unnoticed that is better than what he set out to find. For several years, I was fascinated by old photographs on gravestones. I carefully sifted through every cemetery I knew. On a dreary day I was walking through an isolated graveyard in a remote part of the county. Cows were grazing just outside. I passed a monument topped by a marble lamb quietly watching them. It was both droll and, because of the light and the misting rain, beautiful. I like the resulting photograph better than any of my pictures of pictures on gravestones. I decided to organize photographs into series and try to give each series its own stance or conscience, which might in a subliminal way intensify its content. I discovered slowly over a long period of time that while I was making photographs of specific places and individuals, I was also getting from the series a collective sentiment, something stronger and more pointed than the individual images. It was an effect worth striving to enhance. It required an enormous amount of contemplation, both of the photographs in the series and of my affections and sympathies for the material. I tried to gain a sense of what was missing and the direction I should take to properly move forward. To most people and by any objective appraisal Decatur County is aesthetically banal. The previous generation who created it could barely afford to be expedient, much less stylish. Most photographers would decide from a superficial assessment that there was little to photograph. But in important ways Decatur County is the perfect artifact and documents the quality and values of our predecessors’ sojourn. The instinct to survive and understand something of life, to love and be loved, to maintain a certain dignity, self-respect, and attain some degree of success, at least in our own eyes, motivate us consciously and unconsciously. We have our work, our faith, our social and economic constraints to deal with, and it is on one or more of these fronts that our major battles are joined. Decatur County is neither simple nor insignificant. Life there is like life everywhere, and I cannot think of a higher goal than understanding what we can of it.
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In the series Documentary Arts and Culture Published by the University of North Carolina Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University 272 pages | 201 duotone photographs $45 hardcover | ISBN 978-1-4696-0740-5 Available in April 2013
“ As full of riches as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kwilecki’s sustained portrayal of Decatur County is an American classic.” — a lec soth, photographer and author of From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America “ There is something downright supernatural about Kwilecki’s accomplishment. . . . One Place is . . . a monumental chronicle of the real, messy, complicated, redeemed, and redeeming American spirit.” — r andall kenan, author of Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
To learn more about One Place and other CDS Books:
y documentarystudies.duke.edu/books Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
“One Place is a deep reflection on one artist’s tilling of the soil at the heart of home, but mostly these words and images are about time, what lasts, what doesn’t. . . . People inhabiting the place they share; the place they began, the place they will end.” —Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Thrall
One Place Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
edited by Tom
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Rankin
OCUMEN
First Book Prize in Photography Winner
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Gerard H. Gaskin
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he winner of the 2012 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography is Gerard H. Gaskin for his black-and-white and color photographs that document, as Gaskin writes, “the performative and aesthetic history of the African American and Latino house and ballroom community.” The prestigious biennial prize is open to American and Canadian photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work and who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. The prize honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose. Gaskin describes the subject of his winning project: “The balls are a celebration of black and Latino urban gay life and were born in Harlem out of a need for black and Latino gays to have a safe space to express themselves. Balls are constructed like beauty and talent pageants. The participants work to redefine and critique gender and sexual identity through an extravagant fashion masquerade. Women and men become fluid, interchangeable points of departure and reference, disrupting the notion of a fixed and rigid gender and sexual makeup. All of this happens at night in small halls in cities all over the country: These photographs, taken in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., show us different views of these spaces as they are reflected in the eyes of house and ball members who perform what they wish these cities could be. Balls have come a long way since their beginnings in Harlem; they have influenced popular culture through dance forms such as vogue and gained attention through documentary films like Paris Is Burning. My images try to show a personal and intimate beauty, pride, dignity, courage, and grace that have been painfully challenged by mainstream society.” Renowned curator, historian, and photographer Deborah Willis judged the competition and chose Gaskin to win the prize. She says that she found Gaskin’s photographs “innova-
Visit on the CDS Porch, our news blog, cdsporch.org
tive and spirited,” the images filled with both hope and struggle as “they explore ideas of longing, beauty, and desire. . . . Gaskin’s work looks at the notion of transformation as he turns his lens on what it means to be ‘desired,’ and at the same time, what it feels like to be alienated. His photographs are as exciting to look at as they are a vehicle for imagining the lived experiences of the communities that he has documented. Gaskin’s role is not one of spectator but of interpreter as he enters this safe space of self-creation. In search for beauty, Gaskin’s photographs open our eyes to an extraordinary community of artists who are performing beauty.” Gaskin will receive a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in an online exhibition of prizewinners. He will also have a solo exhibit at the Center for Documentary Studies. Willis will write a foreword to the book, Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene, which will be published in fall 2013 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. This collection of photographs made over a sixteen-year period will be Gaskin’s first book. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Gaskin earned a BA in liberal arts from Hunter College in 1994. As a freelance photographer based in Jersey City, New Jersey, his work has been widely published in the New York Times, Newsday, Black Enterprise, and OneWorld, among many publications; other clientele include record companies Island, Def Jam, and Mercury. His photographs have been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad, including the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum of Art, and Black Magic Woman Festival in Amsterdam. Gaskin’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. To learn more about the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography and to view Gaskin’s work: firstbookprizephoto.com
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Countdown to Full Frame The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies, continued its astounding growth in 2012 with more than thirty-two thousand patrons and a record thirty-eight sold-out events at the annual fourday festival in downtown Durham, North Carolina. The upcoming 2013 festival, April 4–7, will mark Full Frame’s sixteenth anniversary. Passes may still be available; passholders enjoy a host of special benefits, including the opportunity to buy tickets to their preferred screenings before the general public. Tickets to individual screenings and other events go on sale March 25; film descriptions and the festival schedule will be available March 14. fullframefest.org
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Certificate in Documentary Arts Grads Year-round, the Center for Documentary Studies offers classes in the documentary arts to people of all ages and backgrounds through our Continuing Education program. Some participants choose to pursue a Certificate in Documentary Arts, which offers a more structured sequence of courses culminating in the Final Seminar in Documentary Studies, where students finish and present a substantial documentary work on a topic of their choice. These photography, film and video, audio, multimedia, and writing projects often move out into the world to larger audiences in the form of exhibits and installations, websites and publications, radio pieces aired on NPR and international programs, and films shown at festivals. Congratulations to certificate graduates Lorrie Batton, Shaun Flynn, Medina Korda, Diana Monroe, and Indaia Whitcombe, who completed projects in the fall 2012 Final Seminar in Documentary Studies and presented their work to the public in December 2012. To learn more about the certificate students and their projects: cdsporch.org/archives/17119
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Continuing Ed Spring and Summer Classes Registration is still open for some spring classes and for our summer intensive institutes and weekend workshops, which offer both local students and those who live in other areas the opportunity to participate in CDS’s documentary arts program. Classes fill quickly; register now to guarantee your spot. cdscourses.org
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OTHER NEWS
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JOIN FRIENDS OF CDS You can support the programs and projects of the Center for Documentary Studies—a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization affiliated with Duke University—by making a contribution through Friends of CDS. Two Ways To Give: You may make a secure
online donation at documentarystudies.duke. edu/donate or you may send a check payable to “Center for Documentary Studies” to Friends of CDS, 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham, NC 27705. For More Information: Contact Lynn
McKnight, Associate Director for Programs and Development, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University: 919-660-3663 or docstudies@duke.edu
BELOW: Baby (painted black) waiting for tens, Legends Ball, Brooklyn, 2000. OPPOSITE: Ski about to go on stage, Xtravaganza Ball, Manhattan, 2012. Photographs by Gerard H. Gaskin.
Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu
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This special issue of Document celebrates the publication of two new photo books—with accompanying exhibits—by the Center for Documentary Studies.
winter 2013