We Interrupt This Program. . .

Tucker Road in fall, McLemore Cove

This picture of Tucker Road in fall is on the cover of my llimited-edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait. It has nothing to do with this post, but I thought I should at least give you something nice to look at.

I missed posting yesterday because I had to take Louise to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain. We were there for seven hours before we finally got a diagnosis and were able to go home around 2 a.m. It was an attack of diverticulitis, something she has never had before. She will be on meds, clear liquids, jello, etc for several days. She has rested all day today, something that is hard for her to do because she is a very active person. (Wears me out, sometimes!) 

Tomorrow I will get back to moving our possessions from our RV to our new condo. Louise will continue to take it easy until she's over this thing. Your prayers will be appreciated.

(Pentax 6x7 medium format camera, 105mm f2.4 Takumar lens. Fujichrome 100 film scanned on an Epson Perfection 4990 Pro scanner.)

If you like my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

The Assignment of a Lifetime: (Part Two)

 Horse Laugh, U.S. Hwy. 11, McMinn County, Tennessee. (RCB-TN-41)

Blog Note: 

This is Part two of the birth story of the Rock City Barns book. The two parts were originally published as one article in the May, 1999 issue of Rangefinder Magazine. 

Sorting Rock City's old file cards by states and within states by highways, I planned an itinerary for my first trip and began photographing at Sweetwater, Tennessee on October 24, 1994.  Over the next 18 months, stealing time whenever my studio schedule allowed, the trail of barns led my old Chevy Blazer nearly 35,000 miles to more than 500 sites in 15 Southeastern and Midwestern states.  Nearly 250 barns were found in 14 states, with only Michigan proving barren.

With 35-year-old, often sketchy records and occasional hearsay reports as my only sources of information, finding the sites was an endlessly fascinating piece of detective work.  Barns have burned, blown down, been bulldozed for highway construction and subdivisions, or simply fallen from disuse and disrepair.  Many of the largest and finest are gone. To complicate things still further, highways have been changed, re-routed, and re-named.

Often, the only way to locate a site was to find someone who remembered the property owner:

"Do you remember so-and-so, who had a place out on Highway 11 south of here?"

"Oh, yeah, knew him well.  He and my daddy used to go fishin' together all the time.  Good ol' feller.  He's dead now."

"Well, he had this barn on his farm, with a sign that said 'See Rock City.'  Here's an old picture of it."

"Sure, I remember that ol' barn.  Fact is, I helped him take it down, back around 1985.  It had got all rotten and falling down, y'know.  Weren't safe."

I also learned to take the information I was given with a grain of salt.  The people most familiar with an area are often the least observant.  In Robbinsville, North Carolina I asked a gas station attendant about a barn.  "Oh, sure," he said, "It was just down the road here, about a half mile.  But it's been torn down."  Checking for myself, I found his directions to the site were perfect.  But not only was the barn still standing, it had just been repainted and was one of the rare barns with "See Rock City" signs on both sides!

In those pre-digital days, of course, everything was photographed on film, mostly Fujichrome 100. I began the project with a pair of Canon EOS-10S bodies and one EOS-RT and gradually upgraded my equipment so that by the time I finished I was working with two Canon A2s and a 10S.  Lenses carried were the 70-210mm f4, the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5, the 50mm f1.8, the 35mm f2, and the 24mm f2.8, all Canon EF.  Probably 90% of the photographs were made with the 24 and the 28-105.  Exposures were almost always read with a Minolta Flashmeter III in incident mode. Color filters were used frequently to render scenes the way I felt them.

Each barn was also photographed in black and white. (Pre-digital days, remember?)

An average day of photography might involve driving more than 450 miles in 12 to 15 hours, and result in locating eight or ten sites, of which three to five might have barns.  Some days were better than that, of course, and some were much worse.  I spent a total of about 75 days on the assignment, capturing images in winter snow, summer haze, the soft light of spring and the clear light of autumn. Working the sweet early and late light in midsummer meant 18-hour days and not much sleep.

I began the project with some idealism, I suppose. Expecting to find prosperous, story-book farmyards, I often found depressing scenes of rural desolation.  Most of the barns were far from any farmhouse.  Many were dilapidated, some were overgrown with brush.  I learned to take whatever each situation gave me and tried to use that to make a photograph which expressed the spirit of the place

What began as the assignment of a lifetime grew into a labor of love as I came to treasure the dignity and individuality of each old barn.  I learned to see beauty even in the isolation in which so many of them are ending their days.  I learned that they wanted to be photographed in a direct, documentary way, without artifice.  They seemed to say, "Here we are.  This is the way we are.  Please let us speak for ourselves."

(Canon EOS 10S. 24mm f2.8 Canon EF lens. Fujichrome 100 film.)

If you like my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Assignment of a Lifetime (Part One)

See Rock City Barn LA2, U.S. 165, Morehouse Parrish, Louisiana

Blog Note: We are in the process of moving into our new condo and at the same time having some renovations done. In other words, it's a very busy time! So I hope it's okay with you if I continue to repost some columns from the early days of the blog. this time it's Part One of the story of how the Rock City Barns book came to be. It was originally published in the Rangefinder Magazine, May, 1999 issue.

In Indiana, a black cat wound itself around the legs of an old farmer and looked up at me, eyes gleaming in the early light.  In Louisiana, a yellow locomotive emerged from behind a barn just at the right time, under just the right kind of sky.  In Tennessee, a pony positioned himself in front of a barn, threw back his head, and gave me the horse laugh.  Serendipity, which by definition is capricious and unpredictable, became a welcome and almost expected companion as time and again I traveled all day under overcast skies which opened to bathe a barn in rays as I arrived, then closed again.  It was my dream project, the assignment of a lifetime.  And it began with three little words: "Let's do it!"

The man who spoke them was Bill Chapin, president of Rock City Gardens, a tourist attraction near Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Behind the words, a lifetime dream: to create a book about the old barns whose painted message, "See Rock City" became one of the greatest outdoor advertising campaigns of all time.  They launched me on a project that was to occupy much of my time and effort for the next three years and affect my life and business profoundly. 

 

It began with Bill's great-uncle, entrepreneur Garnet Carter, who laid out trails and swinging bridges through ten acres of massive rock formations on the cliffs of Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga.  Hoping to regain his depression-lost fortune, he opened Rock City Gardens to the public in 1932, but unfortunately nobody much came.  Not until 1936 did things improve, when he hired an enterprising young sign painter named Clark Byers to travel the length and breadth of the land painting "See Rock City" on the roof or side of every barn whose owner would allow it.  So diligent and successful was he that as many as 900 barns in 19 states may have carried the Rock City slogan over the years, making it famous around the globe. 

 

The retirement of Byers in 1968, coupled with changing highway sign laws and the completion of the Interstate system brought about a drastic reduction in the barn painting program, as Rock City began to rely on other forms of advertising -- which ultimately brought me into the picture.  As a commercial photographer with a studio in Chattanooga, I began working for the attraction in the early '80s, photographing for brochures and other advertising.  In 1988, Bill told me of his long-held dream of a book about Rock City's barns and asked me to find out what it would cost.

Although he decided not to proceed at that time, my interest was kindled.  I obtained a list of the 110 barns they were still maintaining, and whenever my travels brought me near one I made a photograph of it if possible.  In 1994, after learning that the barns being maintained by Rock City had dwindled to 85, I went back to Chapin with my photos and told him that if he wanted to do a book, now was the time.

He didn't say much.  Just looked at the pictures for about 15 minutes, asked a few questions, then said the magic words: "Let's do it!"

       

A few days later I received a box containing hundreds of old file cards, the only record of most barn locations.  On each card was the name of the last known property owner, the highway route number, and the distance from the nearest town.  Many had a small photo attached, apparently taken about 1960; but some had only rough sketches of the barns.  Inside each card was a record of rents paid (usually $3 to $5 per year) and repaint dates.  Rock City had had no contact with most of the barns since the late '60s.  The only way to find out if they were still standing was to go and see. 

 

So I went. 

 

(Canon EOS-A2, 28-105 f3.5-4.5 Canon EF lens, Fujichrome 100 film.)

 

If you like my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Telling Stories

Lights Out!

Cordele Drive-In Theater

U.S. Hwy. 41, Crisp County, Georgia

 

 

The thing I most like to do with my photography is tell stories. Early in my career I realized that, for me, photography is above all an art of exploration. Yet, it took a long time for this understanding to come to fruition. For many years I randomly clicked my shutter at anything and everything without any structure or purpose other than I thought it might make a good picture. My professional work was moderately successful, but I did not really know who I was as a photographer. 

 

In time, I gradually came to realize that in order to be fully engaged I need to be working toward some sort of story, whether a photo essay or a photos-and-words story. The best years of my career were the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when I was traveling around the country and internationally, developing and shooting A-V programs. Telling stories in photos and words. This kind of work was even more comprehensive than shooting for a magazine article, because it was like making a movie; telling a complete story, but in still photos rather than motion pictures.

Later, I moved on to creating books, which is also a great vehicle for photography; perhaps even better in some ways because books are more permanent.

I’m not an art photographer, except perhaps incidentally, or perhaps I should say accidentally. I’m always looking for visual puns, but other than that I’m mostly not looking for stand-alone photographs, although I certainly take them when I find them. Some photos are a complete story in themselves and require neither context or prior knowledge. Most, however, work better when accompanied by captions or other pictures or text, and some are basically meaningless without that context.

Many of my photographs are not strong on their own, but gain strength from their context as part of a story or sequence. The thing I do, though, is photograph the “thereness” of things. Many of the photographs in Georgia: A BackroadsPortrait are like that, just “there.” Presented without art or artifice. A good example is the photo of Katie’s General Store on page 64. It’s just there and that’s just the way it looked. It bears quiet witness to a vanishing way of life in rural Georgia. As Wright Morris might have put it, it's "commonplace." Not a remarkable picture in itself, but stronger because it's part of the sequence of photographs that precede and follow it.

 

 

Katie's General Store

GA Hwy. 376

Echols County, Georgia

 

 

On the other hand, "Lights Out," the photograph at the head of this post, can stand alone, telling its story without need of a context. But it also adds strength to the sequence in which it appears, a story of time passing, a world fading away.

My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of 

life.

 

This is a repost from January 31, 2020. We closed on our new-to-us condo in Knoxville yesterday, January 31, 2023.

If you like my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photographs and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

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

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.