Light Is A Thing


It is over ten years ago that I photographed Eudora Welty and this project began. Several months before my meeting Ms. Welty, I had met another southern writer, Louis Rubin. A magazine in New York flew me down to Chapel Hill for a story about him and his press, Algonquin. Louis had not seen any of my work so on a whim, he commissioned me to photograph the founding members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers for their archives in the Chattanooga. There were twenty-eight members and it took two years get them, one by one, in front of my camera. It was suggested that I expand the project into a book, so I did. Several months is what I thought it would take to complete the project, six years later I did.
One of the greatest difficulties in taking on this project was, not only compiling a list of contemporary southern writers, but then finding out how to reach them. The answer to both questions was found at the New York City 42nd Street Library. There is a room specifically for contemporary literature and I started at “A”. For the sake of the writers privacy I won’t reveal exactly how I found their home addresses but it was with the library’s computer. The best source for contacting the writers was the writers themselves. In the beginning, ever writer I photographed gave me the names and addresses of three others. So once I began the portraits it was hard to know when to stop. Near the end, I photographed George Garrett, a writer with the reputation of knowing everyone. With some reluctance on having my load increased, I asked George if he would look at my list to see if there was anyone I’d missed. Indeed he gave me the names of two more writers but then he asked; “Do you mind if I write down the addresses of some of these guys. I’ve been wanting write them but I had no idea where they lived.”
Some of the writers declined being photographed for this book but not many. A few I was never able to locate. To the viewer of this book I apologize if there is a face missing, it is probably because I failed with my camera and lights. The last portrait was of Alice Walker, a brief encounter in a side room of a hotel lobby in Chapel Hill. The project came to an end within walking distance from where it had begun and with tens of thousands of miles and hours in between.
The writers were remarkably generous with their time and they were open with their ideas and willing to listen to mine. What a writer does with ink and paper is quite different then what I do with camera and film. But we both make objects. With many of them we talked about our different mediums, the structure of forms and what one hoped to achieve in making them and trying to make them with beauty. Light is a thing. It is a particle of energy moving at the fastest speed possible in our universe. For a photographer it is essential, a photograph can not be made without it. In a different way, it is to a writer as well. “A photograph is always sentimental, because it is about the past” Max Steele declared on my day with him. My response was to ask him if he felt sentimental about the photograph of the suspected Viet con spy with the mayor of Saigon pressing the barrel of a 38 revolver to his temple. “Lord no, of course not.” If there was an exception then Max’s statement could not be true but there are many truths. Most of my life has been spent looking at the world as a photographer. The answers to many questions I feel I have found but many remain and probable even more questions have yet to be to be discovered. A photograph is a document of light and time. Painters and photographers move through space with one eye closed and eventually coming to rest at a singular point of perceptive. ”Think of what one can do with a book, you can take any number of characters through time and place. Change the events of their lives and the experience of their evolving natures. To be able to show their thoughts and emotions and all with something you can hold in your hand.” William Faulkner told his students. A writer’s world is twenty six characters, each letter representing a sound. Depending on the language, the letters are placed together to make different words. Each word being a metaphor for an abstract idea. A book is a string of words put together in a particular order to tell a story. In making a novel the author creates a myriad of perspectives and, hopefully, with the possibility that the reader will be able to find many of their own. When I asked Andrew Lytle why the south had such a strong heritage of literature it was clear from his response that this was a question he had asked himself many times. “In order to create anything original, one has to except the possibility failure. Because we lost the civil war, failure has always been a part of the South’s culture.” The difference between a writer’s palette and mine was made clear to me by Mary Hood. At the end of an afternoon of talk and iced tea, she rose from her rocking chair as I was about to depart and turned to look back at it. The chair had belonged to her grandmother, she informed me, and her grandmother would never take a seat in the chair without first moving it, even if just a little. Driving back to Atlanta that day, I considered the image Mary had placed in my head. One could spend a lifetime living was someone and not see what she had seen, or at least not to talk about it. Her grandmother’s slight adjustments were her way to reclaim the chair but it took a writer’s vision to see it.
The only tangible evidence of my Guggenheim Fellowship is my car. Four wheels, and a stack of prints and an even bigger pile of negatives. On the last leg of my final journey down South on this project the odometer in my car rolled over. All those nines became all those zeros. It happened somewhere on the Maryland Turnpike and, several days later, I realized it must have been near the Mason/ Dixon Line. There were so many roads I traveled so many times. My favorite is Highway 319, a two lane black top that takes you from Tifton, Georgia to Tallahassee, Florida. I first drove it when attending graduate school at F.S.U. and have driven it more times than I can count and always alone.
There are strip malls and franchised food but mostly it moves through flat farmland and a few small towns that appear to have lost their purpose. It has always given me pleasure to driving it, even at night. I can not say why I love it but I do. The poet, John Stone, told me he and Seamus Heaney had decided the most powerful word in the English language was “it”. Auguste Renoir said that what makes a work of art great is an intangible it. Wherever and whatever it is, a river runs through it.
New York City will always be my home but as I sit at my desk and look out at the rooftops of Helsinki, I wonder if I’ll ever live there again. On returning to my studio from the longest trip south on this project, there, waiting for me, was a pile of mail two feet high. Most of it was junk, of course, but on top was a plain, white index card from Donald Justice. A brief note to say, yes he would sit for me but he thought I should know he no longer considered himself a southerner, even though he was born there. His note ended; ” and now, just now, I’m staring out the study window at the snow and ice, and not minding it at all.”


Curt Richter
Helsinki, Finland
June, 2000

Copyright by Curt Richter 2000