Where a writer lives is almost always one of the two facts you can count on learning from reading the author's bio on the back flap of her book. The other is what my grandmother would have called "her circumstances"—meaning, with whom she lives, and whether or not there are children. In contemporary bios, cats and dogs are sometimes interchangeable with children, so that we read: "Writer X lives in Jackson, Mississippi with her husband and two dalmations." The assumption is that the writer is rooted in that place, but anyone who knows writers knows that they are vagabonds. Sometimes they live where they live because of a teaching job. Other times, it's because their mate has roots in that area. But more often, they're just passing through, whether or not they know it. In my own case, only two or three times have I still been living where my newly published book has placed me. Writers move around a lot. This sometimes has to do with research, but more often it's a kind of exploration of ones-self, an experiment to see what you're like under different circumstances. A resistance against being situated in one place is analogous to what writers try to infuse into their work: If you don't keep moving, the writing will become de-energized, and repetitive writing is doomed.
I realize that many writers have spent all, or most of their lives in or around the same place, though that isn't usual in America. When we think of Eudora Welty, the first thing that comes to mind may be the P.O., but then immediately thereafter we think of Jackson, Mississippi. Others have migrated, and some of those have formed expatriate communities, but within those communities, they seem to be identified as Southern writers. Editors compiling anthologies will track down a Southern writer in Alaska or Prague, because it is assumed the Southern writer trails his or her Southernness like clouds of glory. There are, of course, those who have returned to the South after spending long periods elsewhere, such as Charles Wright.
Wherever they go, one of the things that inevitably accompanies them is the watchfulness of others, who see them all as representatives; in them resides a literary tradition, a still not quite defined otherness as formidable as it is mysterious.
Flannery O'Connor, in a lecture given at Georgetown University, said: "The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms." She is traditionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home. It is difficult to separate the virtues of this quality from the narrowness which accompanies and colors it for the outside world. It is more difficult still to reconcile the South's instinct to preserve her identity with her equal instinct to fall eager victim to every poisonous breath from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. But good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine, and as far as the creation of a body of fiction is concerned, the social is superior to the purely personal. Somewhere is better than anywhere. And traditional manners, however unbalanced, are better than no manners at all." (What O'Connor called "the purely personal" has become a mass mea culpa of memoir writing that I suspect would not much interest her; certainly the entire concept of manners has been through so many permutations from the time and context in which she wrote that Miss Manners herself would have a difficult task explaining to O'Connor why manners so quickly became a lost art. But I digress.) Ask people what they think of when you say, "Southern writer," and my guess is that many will not immediately come up with a generalization about them, but about the region, itself—much like O'Connor's explanation of the South in her essay. But then (here they may hesitate) as for the writers, aren't there those certain, you know, grotesque elements . . . because, I mean, those Southern writers can just be so crazy! Southern writers are expected to be rooted in their region. They are expected to be highly imaginative (this is the euphemism for crazy, which people make as a generalization about all writers). They are expected to have a strange sense of humor. Their characters are expected to have a lot to say. Though these characterizations are hardly limited to writers from the South, I think there is still a pervasive belief that Southern writers are telling real stories disguised as fiction, which they can learn about just by being in the right place at the right time—all of the South being the right place. I mention these common stereotypes not merely to dismiss them, but to put forth the idea that Southern writers, in being made conveniently larger than life, in being romanticized until they are a little scarier than others of their kind, have come to typify the extreme of the species: they're more flamboyant, wilder—they're the leopards that make us nervous around cats, the fall guys for writers in general.
Curt Richter came to my house in Maine one day when a friend—a Southern writer, as it happens—was visiting from Texas. She and my husband decided to go sailing, running off before they'd have to make pleasantries with the day's visitor, rubbing it in that I was stuck with an obligation. Being as unrepresentative a Northerner as a Southerner, I hate sailing, so I waved them off with equanimity. My mixed emotions only had to do with being photographed. Of course, everyone worries about what they will look like in a photograph. The worry is not only that you might not look good, but you might not be able to tell whether you look good or not. "What do you think of this?" I'd said many times over the years, to my husband or to friends, holding out a photograph that did not please or displease so much as it perplexed me. The worry is, of course, that they will not really level with you about how you look. Alternatively, they might really level with you ("Oh—look at those charming little worry lines at the sides of your eyes!"). Since one of my best friends was a photographer, I often hear his words before a shoot begins: "Annie—light on the make-up" (He would make his words light when he said this). "And chin up. Chin up" (I see him with his tipped-up chin). I put on a gauzy skirt I rarely wore (hedging my bets: If I looked silly, at least it wasn't me in the photograph) and a weird ring I did sometimes wear, just because it was so ludicrous that it was amusing to hear what people would say. We hadn't finished furnishing the house in 1995, but we did have an Empire sofa that I loved. In fact, Curt took a picture of me on the sofa, gauzy skirt spread around me, big ring pointed at the camera like a piece of kryptonite, and I'm not just saying this: in the photograph, the sofa looks great In the photograph included in this book, you will note that the sofa does not appear.
As an observer of this collection of photographs, as distinct from being the subject of one of them, I can make a number of observations. I know some of the writers—not the majority, but some—and with those faces that were familiar, I could hardly take my eyes away. Perhaps they would have the same reaction, looking at me . . . trying to discover what? Whether the expression was quintessential (I'd probably be the last to know), or a revelation; how much vitality made it from the person into the photograph; what aspects seem to have been revealed unconsciously. It's also interesting to study the composition and to consider the question of the person's placement within the parameters—how this structuring might also reveal something about the subject. The backgrounds are uniformly obliterated or so unobtrusive as to almost disappear, though Richter, unlike Avedon in The American West, is clearly not there to document. Some of the images verge on being formal portraits—something Karsh might have done. But with Karsh, you would expect more . . . straightforwardness, for lack of a better word. When you have anything resembling straightforwardness here, there is some element in the expression that undercuts the formality. Not a photograph here could be included with a curriculum vitae, without the recipient being taken aback. Had the angle of her head been different, Bobbie Ann Mason's photograph might have been more conventional. As it is, the riveting asymmetry of her face, coupled with the delicate fineness of her hair, suggests both the strong presence of the woman, as well as a certain enigmatic delicacy. I know her as smiling and disarmingly direct. But of course: beneath that was always this other person. That, it seems to me, is something very difficult to do as a photographer: to wait for the expressive moment that has little or nothing to do with the face people usually present to the world, while at the same time avoiding the slackness of an out-take. (Avedon's legendary photograph of Marilyn Monroe, eyes dropped, would be another classic example of succeeding in this way.)
Notice the way so many of Richter's subjects clasp their hands—the hands that take on a life of their own when they write. Viewed apart from the whole, seen only in detail, it would often be difficult to say whether they were restful hands or tortured hands; only when you see the subject's face, read the subject's body language, can you know (look at Andrew Lytle's hands; look at Kaye Gibbons's). Reynolds Price's hands could exist apart from his photograph as a piece of sculpture; John Coplans or Holly Wright, I'm sure, would love to move in close for a detail. It's tempting, but ultimately unfair, here, to separate the hands from the portrait. Reynolds's hands become the second focal point of the circle, as the eye travels from head to hands. The constant movement of the eye becomes the animation that counterbalances Reynolds's inwardness.
I admire Curt Richter's work not just because it's striking and unusual, but also because it's subtle. I know something about placing people (albeit, imaginary) in certain contexts—in using the external world to help explain, or reinforce, psychological portraits. Backgrounds, contexts—which, for all intents and purposes, Curt Richter does not depend upon—can do a lot of the work for a photographer. In theory, they can make the task easier, just as excessive characters are usually easier for the writer to present vividly than subtle ones. There are certain photographers whose landscapes are personified (Sally Mann's recent work), others who poeticize a landscape through portraiture (Avedon's American West). But it is extremely difficult to make portraits with only the sparest, simplest props. Richter is somewhat analogous to Samuel Beckett in his working method. In the arts, at the end of the millennium, there has been a drift away from O'Connor's belief that "somewhere is better than anywhere," so that we have become acclimated, if not necessarily comfortable, with the idea that simple forms can possess the greatest intensity. (Cyberspace is nowhere that is nevertheless considered a place; it is also, inevitably, a metaphor.)
Finally, what strikes me about these photographs is their candor. The subjects were comfortable with the photographer, and he with them. They're riveting, because you have to look deep within. As you do that, of course you are looking within yourself, only momentarily studying the portrait of another.


Ann Beattie
Key West, Florida
January 2000




Copyright by Ann Beattie 2000