DOCUMENTSpecial iSSue • Spring 2013

CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

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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 RankinAssociate Director for Programs and Development: Lynn McKnightPublishing Director: Alexa DilworthArt Director: Bonnie CampbellCommunications Coordinator: Elizabeth PhillipsPublishing 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 injus-tices. 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.

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.

FeAtuReD 3One PlaceNew book, website, and exhibit feature forty years’ worth of images from Decatur County, Georgia, by self-taught photogra-pher Paul Kwilecki

First Book Prize in Photography WinnerWebsite 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

otHeR neWS 11Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Certificate in Documentary Arts Graduates

Continuing Ed: Spring Classes and Summer Institutes

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

ONE PLACE

Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia

Edited and with an introduction by Tom Rankin, coedited by Iris Tillman Hill

PAUL 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 reso-nance 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 Docu-mentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

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“ 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: 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.”

— randall 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

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Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) is the author of Understand-ings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia. Tom Rankin directs both the Center for Documentary Studies and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Docu-mentary Arts (MFAEDA) at Duke University. Iris Tillman Hill, former CDS director, is coeditor of the Documentary Arts and Culture series.

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I AM FREqUENTLy ASKED by people who have not seen my work why I spend my life docu-menting 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 Deca-tur County as elsewhere.

I was both nourished and wounded by Decatur County. I know the place like I know myself. Its land-scape 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 photo-graph 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 photo-graph 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 indi-viduals, I was also getting from the series a collective sentiment, something stronger and more pointed than the individual images. It was an effect worth striv-ing 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 ex-pedient, 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 dig-nity, 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 insignifi-cant. Life there is like life everywhere, and I cannot think of a higher goal than understanding what we can of it.

—Paul Kwilecki, excerpted from his essay “Decatur County” in One Place

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

Exhibit

In the series Documentary Arts and CulturePublished by the University of North Carolina Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University272 pages | 201 duotone photographs$45 hardcover | ISBN 978-1-4696-0740-5Available in April 2013

PAUL KWILECKI and Four Decades of Photographs

from Decatur County, Georgia

ONE PLACE

Edited by TOM RANKIN

ONEPLACE

Paul Kwilecki

and Four

Decades of

Photographs

from

Decatur

County,

Georgia

“ These pictures refl ect 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

“ 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

Though artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) chose to remain 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 four decades, he documented life in his communi-ty, making hundreds of masterful and intimate 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 photo-graphs 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.”

Edited by TOM

RANKIN

“ 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

unc

pressDocumentary Arts and CulturePublished in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

The University of North Carolina Press www.uncpress.unc.edu

“One Place is a deep refl ection 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

“ 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 Refl ections 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

Paul Kwilecki (1928–2009) is the author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia.

Tom Rankin directs both the Center for Docu-mentary Studies (CDS) and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University.

Iris Tillman Hill, former CDS director, is coeditor of the Documentary Arts and Culture series.

Documentary Arts and CulturePublished in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

The University of North Carolina Presswww.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. . . . 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

PAUL KWILECKI and Four Decades of Photographs

from Decatur County, Georgia

One Place

edited by ToM RaNKIN

Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

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The 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 performa-tive 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 sub-jective realities. The prize honors work that is visually com-pelling, 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 con-structed 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 differ-ent 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 begin-nings 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-

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tive and spirited,” the images filled with both hope and strug-gle 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 com-munity 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:

y firstbookprizephoto.com

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First Book Prize in Photography Winner

Gerard H. Gaskin

Find out more about CDS at documentarystudies.duke.edu

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Countdown to Full FrameThe 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 four-day festival in downtown Durham, North Carolina. The upcom-ing 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.

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Certificate in Documentary Arts Gradsyear-round, the Center for Documentary Studies offers class-es in the documentary arts to people of all ages and back-grounds 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 Whit-combe, who completed projects in the fall 2012 Final Semi-nar in Documentary Studies and presented their work to the public in December 2012.

To learn more about the certificate students and their projects:

y cdsporch.org/archives/17119

Continuing Ed Spring and Summer ClassesRegistration 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.

y cdscourses.org

OTHER NEWS

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

JOIN FRIENDS OF CDS

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.

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Special iSSue • Spring 2013

CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY