(Roughly) Daily

Wendell Brock on photographer Paul Kwilecki, who spent four decades documenting a single southwest Georgia county, a place he called home and where he never truly fit in…

Paul Kwilecki, the great Southern documentary photographer, was so enamored of his hometown that he could get homesick without even leaving. 

He spent a remarkable four decades taking pictures of Bainbridge, Georgia, and surrounding Decatur County – and virtually no place else.

“The picture of the stores on Broad Street that I took Sunday is so lyrical and melancholy and has such a quality of loneliness that it has set me to thinking and feeling further in this direction,” Kwilecki wrote in his private journal in 1967, just seven years into his singular body of work. 

“In that picture I put my finger on a feeling that is distinctly little-town. The stillness of the buildings with not a person in sight gives the viewer the feeling that he is standing alone just across the street about to cry with homesickness, in spite of this all being familiar and his hometown, for it is a more remote, unapproachable home that he longs for. This is as poetic an image as I ever made and I want to pursue the quality that makes it so.” 

Exactly what was the “remote, unapproachable home” this isolated artist so desperately yearned for? Was it a metaphor for heaven? A memory of a lost moment in time?…

… Over time, Kwilecki’s great themes would emerge: home, memory, the passage of time, the certainty of death. And by the time of his own death in 2009, at age 81, he had metamorphosed from a somber young man into a sweet, wistful grandpa with a white beard and a yellow Labrador retriever he fed cubes of cheese and talked to like a baby. By then, Charlotte, his beloved wife of 56 years, was gone, and his work was done: He’d shot thousands of images and culled them down to the 539 master prints that form the core of the Paul Kwilecki Photographs and Papers Collection in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Consisting of more than 9,000 items in 56 boxes and one large folder — 42 linear feet — the archive is a trove of negatives, prints, contact sheets, journals, letters, speeches, and arcana that reveal the soul of the self-taught artist from Bainbridge.

Today, photo geeks the world over consider Paul Kwilecki a master of the documentary form. I’ve never met a serious photographer or curator who didn’t want to pull up a chair and rhapsodize about Kwilecki. Never. You can see his influence on Athens-based Mark Steinmetz, Bainbridge native Jimmy Nicholson, North Carolina’s Rob Amberg, Kentucky’s Sarah Hoskins.

And yet to the general public, Kwilecki’s iconic images of the Decatur County Courthouse, Willis Park, Oak City Cemetery, the Flint River, and numerous other scenes barely register. Kwilecki got this. He did not feel seen — and felt required to explain himself at every turn, from the first picture to the last…

Brock traces Kwilecki’s steps, combs through his archives (sharing more photos), and cracks open his personal journals, revealing the man’s inner life​ – and genius: “The Only Home He Ever Knew,” from @MrBrock in @BitterSouth.

* Paul Theroux, Deep South

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As we reflect, we might send carefully-composed birthday greetings to Berenice Abbott; she was born on this date in 1898. While studying to be a sculptor in Paris in 1921, Abbott signed on as assistant to Man Ray, and quickly developed a reputation for her photographic portraits of his artist friends, then more generally of important cultural figures of the interwar period.

In 1929, Abbott moved to New York, having been taken with the city’s “photographic potential.” Over the next decade, she focused on documentary photography and on portraying the city as it underwent a transformation into a modern metropolis. Ralph Steiner wrote in PM that Abbott’s work was “the greatest collection of photographs of New York City ever made.”

Abbott’s third act began in the 1940s, when she turned to science. Abbott’s style of straight photography helped her make important contributions to scientific photography. She produced a series of photographs for a high-school physics textbook, developed by the Physical Science Study Committee project based at MIT to improve secondary school physics teaching. Between 1958 and 1961, she made a series of photographs for Educational Services Inc., which were later published. They were subsequently presented by the Smithsonian Institution in an exhibition titled Image of Physics. Then, in 2012, some of her work from this era was displayed at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For more on Abbott– and many examples of her wonderful work– see here, here, and here.