A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



B. 



light & Air 



By David Cecelski • Photos courtesy of the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill 



"ayard Wootten has long been one of my favorite 

 photographers. Born in New Bern in 1 875, she ran portrait 

 studios in New Bern and Chapel Hill for nearly half a century. 

 She was both a talented studio photographer and a gifted 

 pictorialist with a fine artist's eye. She went anywhere, 

 anytime, to get a good photograph. Camera in hand, she stayed 

 for days in an Appalachian logging camp, flew in a Wright 

 brothers' airplane and prowled the Croatan swamps. 



Wootten' s life and 

 work are introduced to 

 younger generations in 

 Light and Air: The 

 Photography of Bayard 

 Wootten, a splendid new 

 book by Jerry Cotten, the 

 photographic archivist at 

 UNC-Chapel Hill's North 

 Carolina Collection. 

 Cotten' s book tells much 

 about North Carolina 

 earlier this century. 



Light and Air focuses 

 on Wootten' s photographs 

 of the Great Depression. 

 They stand out in sharp 

 contrast to the better- 

 known pictures made by 

 the photographers of the 

 Farm Security Adminis- 

 tration (FSA), a New Deal 

 agency charged with 

 documenting rural 

 hardship. Full of pathos 

 and hopelessness, the FSA 

 photographs are the most 

 enduring images of the 

 1930s. Let Us Now Praise 

 Famous Men, by James 

 Agee and Walker Evans, 

 contains probably the 

 best-known photographs 



Photographer Bayard Wootten at work 



of that ilk: stark images of hollow-eyed Alabama tenant farmers 

 living dreary, poverty-stricken lives. 



FSA photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea 

 Lange have had the most profound influence on American 

 documentary photography this century. But while their 

 photographs inspired pity, they rarely meant much to Southern- 

 ers. This is not because people in the South failed to recognize 

 the FSA's harsh images of the Depression. Rare was the rural 



Southern family that did 

 not know poverty and 

 privation in those years. 

 Rather, few Southerners, 

 black or white, agreed 

 with the bleak, one- 

 dimensional view of the 

 human spirit portrayed in 

 the FSA photographs. 



Wootten saw a 

 different South, though 

 her photographs did not 

 ignore the hardships of 

 the Great Depression. She 

 did not conceal ragged 

 clothes, dilapidated 

 homes or the gauntness of 

 so many of the people she 

 photographed. But my 

 favorite of Wootten' s 

 photographs go far 

 beyond social criticism — 

 they depict a hard-pressed 

 people mustering the 

 grace and strength to 

 survive the Great 

 Depression. 



Look, for instance, at 

 the 1937 photograph of 

 the girl taking a break 

 from picking strawberries 

 (opposite page). She was 

 one of many seasonal 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 19 



