By Norm Powers
Nearly 30 years ago, photographer Tim Barnwell was assigned to shoot a feature on Appalachian traditions for a regional lifestyle magazine. He had no idea at the time that the assignment would take on a life of its own, evolving into a personal passion and spawning a series of photographic essays that would capture a piece of vanishing Americana.
"I got interested in the people I met and kept going back," Tim says of the years he’s spent visiting the farms and villages of rural Appalachia with a large format camera in tow. "These were people whose faces showed a life of hard work, but their spirit still showed through."
The first fruit of his travels was The Face of Appalachia, published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2003. A collection of more than 100 exquisite black-and-white studies of Appalachian families and their environment, it is accompanied by text drawn from hours of interviews. Published in 2007, Tim’s second book, On Earth’s Furrowed Brow, concentrates on family farms and traditions that have somehow managed to survive in an age of corporate agriculture, along with the community support systems that help keep them alive.
It’s an uphill struggle. "While many of the younger generations still live on the family farm, very few actually farm for a living," Tim says. "Most have built homes on their parents’ place but drive off the farms to work in the towns and surrounding communities. Mostly today it’s cattle grazing and some hay being grown, but rarely even a garden plot."
A third book, tentatively titled Hands In Harmony, will focus on music and handicrafts, and is scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2009.
Tim’s images evoke the tradition of Depression-era photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, with one important difference. "So many works about Appalachia emphasize the downtrodden," says Chan Gordon of The Captain’s Bookshelf, the Asheville fine-art bookstore where Tim’s work has often been exhibited. "But Tim’s work is full of hope and integrity."
Whether sitting on a simple iron bed in a plainly furnished bedroom or resting from their labors in a clod-strewn field, many of Tim’s subjects in On Earth’s Furrowed Brow look proudly and confidently at us, without a hint of self-pity or despair, and seem perfectly at ease with their life and with the visitor who’s come to take their picture.
The sense of intimacy is the result of the weeks spent with his subjects before setting up his bulky 4x5 Linhof camera and tripod. "Probably, if I’d just walked up to them with a camera hanging around my neck, they wouldn’t have taken me too seriously," Tim says.
Tim’s own long association with the mountains also helped the process. "There are a lot of Barnwells in the Appalachians," Tim says. "The first ones came to the mountains in the 1700s. It’s a pretty familiar landscape to me." Born in Franklin, North Carolina, and raised in Henderson and Buncombe counties, Tim bought his first camera for five dollars when he was still a boy.
By the time he arrived at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, he was already developing and printing his work in his own darkroom. He refined his skills by studying with landscape photographer George Tice, who was often a guest lecturer at Appalachian Photographic Workshops, where Tim served as executive director for eight years before organizing the thriving commercial photography business in Asheville that bears his name.
But the mountains, and the rapidly disappearing culture they’ve sheltered for centuries, keep drawing him back to what Tim calls his "personal work," which is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the High Museum in Atlanta, among others.
"I’ve seen many changes in the land and the people over the past 30 years," Tim says. "Tobacco, for better or worse, has all but disappeared over just the past three years, taking away the major cash crop people could grow for extra income and to pay their property taxes. Many farms have been put up for sale as children inherit them and cannot afford the taxes."
Hints of the strain can be discerned in a few of the photographs from On Earth’s Furrowed Brow—in a farmer’s arm draped protectively over a basket of apples harvested from Henderson County’s ubiquitous orchards, or in the hunched shoulders of a Madison County farmer taking a rest from tilling his field. But then there is Pearl Gosnell, calmly airing her handmade quilts on her cabin’s porch in Paw Paw, as she’s done every spring for as long as she can remember, or Ernest Rector sitting almost defiantly, arms crossed over his chest, in his one-room house in Marshall.
They are among the first subjects photographed by Tim in the early 1980s, yet their resolve and resilience still speak clearly to us today. We can see something of ourselves in them, and find ourselves hoping that they are still there, still surviving.
