A Man for All Seasons

Reverend/Senator/General Wayne Burkes, Jackson, MS 

A bi-vo pastor? What's that?

Big deal, I thought when I first heard the term. It's just a man who holds a regular job and also pastors a church. I was very familiar with the concept, although I had not heard the term, because my father did it all his life. But bi-vocational is the term Southern Baptists use for such people, and that's okay with me, because it resulted in a nice assignment.

In 1988, the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board (since reorganized under another name), decided to run an article in their magazine, Missiions USA, featuring a representative group of men selected from the many bi-vocational pastors in the denomination.

Long-time close friend and distinguished graphic designer Michael Largent, was design editor at Missions USA at the time, and he gave me an assignment to photograph several of the men.

Each of these pastors was an impressive person with an interesting story. Some worked a second job because their congregations were too small or poor to support them. Others because they enjoyed the challenge of burning the candle at both ends. But the most impressive man was not a bi-vocational pastor; he was TRI-vocational. And what vocations! Each of them would have been as much as most men would want to handle, but Wayne Burkes was not only the pastor of one of Jackson, Mississippi's largest Baptist churches; he was also a Mississippi state senator and a general in the Mississippi Air National Guard, where he flew massive C-130 cargo planes.

I photographed Rev./Senator/General Burkes in the cockpit of his C-130, but the shot that I (and Michael) preferred was made in the rotunda of the state capital at Jackson. Posing him by the balustrade on the second level of the building, I placed one light with an umbrella reflector at a 45-degree angle to his right front and a second, similar but weaker light to his left rear. Then, going down one level, I directed one more light upward to fill some of the shadows. With a slight wide-angle lens, probably a 35mm on my Olympus OM camera, I shot upward to include as much of the dome of the rotunda as possible. The film was Fujichrome 100.

"That's a good one," said Michael, as he reviewed my coverage. "Put it in your portfolio." And so I did.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone 

Noticing Incongruity

Boynton Beauty Salon

 If you've been reading my blog for very long, you may have noticed that I keep coming back to the subject of noticing things. If you want to make good photographs you have to keep your eyes open. As the great Elliott Erwitt, one of the most significant photographers of the last half of the 20th century, said, "The most important ability in photography is the ability to notice things." I wrote more extensively about this here and here.

Best Iron Works in Town

Orange Walk Town, Belize

 

One of the things I'm always looking for is incongruity, which is defined as placing things together that visually don't belong together, that are incompatible with each other. One of my all-time favorite examples of incongruity was a sign on a store in Chattanooga that sold prosthetics. It read "STUBBS: Limbs and Braces."

Unfortunately, although I passed the store many times, I never photographed the sign. I always told myself that I would get it next time, but I never did. Which reminds me of something that I want to write about soon: photocrastination.

Meantime, keep your eyes open for visual incongruities -- things that have funny or interesting ways of not fitting together.

 Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone 

 

Breakfast at Susie's

Breakfast at Susie's

The name of Susie’s Café on the square in beautiful downtown LaFayette, Georgia was officially Susie’s Sunset Café. But I’ve always thought it should have been named Susie’s Sunrise Café, because in the early morning the rising sun streamed in through the plate-glass front and illuminated everything all the way to the back wall.

Susie’s had booths down each side for those who preferred a feeling of relative privacy. But it also had a couple of long tables down the middle where lawyers, businessmen, farmers, factory workers, and gas station attendants ate their breakfasts together and chewed the fat (no reflection on the bacon) in amiable equality. 

Susie's is gone now, but there are still places like it in small towns around the country. In fact, Louise and I ate breakfast in a very similar place in Wyoming when we pulled our camper west in 2018.  

Adapted from my limited-edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.

This photograph was made with a small Olympus SPn 35mm rangefinder camera with a 40mm lens and Fujicolor 400 color negative film. I was casually watching the men from a booth across from their table, and when I  saw a composition I liked I quietly raised the camera and shot two or three frames.

 Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone 

At Home in Florida

Our Trailer and Truck (and Louise) at Home in Florida

It was a long time comin', but we are finally in Florida. We're at the Florida SKP Resort near Wauchula, and it is unlike any place we've ever been. Spacious sites, concrete pads, grassy yards -- we've never seen, or even imagined a campground like this. It's owned by the Escapees Club, and because we are members the rate is half what we would usually pay.

Wauchula, by the way, is about 50 miles east of Sarasota-Bradenton, and about 90 miles southwest of Orlando. All of which means that it's in the middle of nowhere.

The weather is fabulous--80s in the daytime, and cool at night. Louise, who grew up in Miami, says she had never realized how much she missed south Florida.

We are booked here for the rest of March, and may stay for a week or two in April. Or, we may move to northeast Florida near DeLand to see some friends. In May we plan to begin working our way north and west, to South Dakota and Montana, see Yellowstone again, and visit our granddaughter and her family in Idaho and two grandsons, one with a family, in Utah.

That's the plan, but as I said before, man plans, God laughs. (God has been laughing at us quite a bit lately, but here's hoping!)

 Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone