Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
    One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
    One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
    Ebook255 pages1 hour

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

    By Paul Kwilecki and Tom Rankin

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Though artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928-2009) chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur 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 community, 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 farming, 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 200 photographs and selected prose.
    Paul Kwilecki worked alone, his correspondence with important photographers his only link to the larger art world. Despite this isolation, 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."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateApr 9, 2013
    ISBN9781469607436
    One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia
    Author

    Paul Kwilecki

    Paul Kwilecki is the author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia.

    Related to One Place

    Related ebooks

    Photography For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      New Zealand Books

      Jan 13, 2020

      In 1973, at a Guy Fawkes party in Wellington, Anne Kennedy’s 22-year-old brother Philip suffered a fall and died. It was clearly a shocking event that deeply affected her parents and all their seven children. Philip had been troubled with epilepsy an

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Fold in Time

      Jun 9, 2020

      A Fold in Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      American Families

      Dec 4, 2018

      American Families
      9 min read

    • Article

      Window On Hotere

      Oct 18, 2020

      Window On Hotere
      6 min read

    • Article

      Books With The Most Impact

      Dec 4, 2021

      Books With The Most Impact
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ans Westra (1936-2023)

      May 12, 2023

      Ans Westra (1936-2023)
      5 min read

    • Article

      Hunting for History Books

      Sep 3, 2019

      Hunting for History Books
      11 min read

    • Article

      How the Federal Writers’ Project Shaped a Generation of Authors

      Oct 16, 2023

      The Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s proved an education in art and empathy. The post How the Federal Writers’ Project Shaped a Generation of Authors appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Mar 1, 2022

      Table Talk
      8 min read

    • Article

      Sacks Of Neuroses

      Dec 6, 2020

      Sacks Of Neuroses
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Life Through The Lens

      Feb 24, 2022

      A Life Through The Lens
      8 min read

    • Article

      Flood The World With Beauty

      Nov 1, 2019

      A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, par

      8 min read

    • Article

      Family Matters

      Apr 27, 2023

      Family Matters
      11 min read

    • Article

      L.A.’s Black Woodstock: Wattstax

      Jan 5, 2021

      L.A.’s Black Woodstock: Wattstax
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Dec 19, 2021

      by Nikki Crutchley HarperCollins — $35 Many things make this thriller stand out. For a start, the narrators are reliable. That’s refreshing, these days. Crutchley tells her story in more than one voice and time period, but all are clearly handled and

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Poet at Work

      Oct 11, 2017

      The Poet at Work
      16 min read

    • Article

      Stacy Schiff

      Dec 15, 2017

      Stacy Schiff
      26 min read

    • Article

      An Appreciation Of Muriel Rukeyser, “St. Roach”

      Sep 1, 2021

      For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,they showed me by every action to despise your kind;for that I saw my people making war on you,I could not tell you apart, one from anothe

      15 min read

    • Article

      Paddling Through History

      Jun 15, 2023

      Paddling to DeCourcy Island is at the top of my summer activities wish list. The Southern Gulf Island region is steeped in thousands of years of culture and history for the Snuneymuxw, Stz’uminus, Lyackson, Halalt, and Penelakut First Nations. DeCour

      9 min read

    • Article

      Your LETTERS

      Nov 12, 2021

      Your LETTERS
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for One Place

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      One Place - Paul Kwilecki

      NO DEADLINE SHORT OF THE GRAVE

      TOM RANKIN

      Just above the typewriter in his downtown Bainbridge, Georgia, office Paul Kwilecki stapled a collection of quotations and readings to the wall. These were words he wanted to have directly in front of him. He spent hours at his desk, the kind of solitary time he relished, witnessed in part by the thousands of meticulously typed pages from his journals, his darkroom data entries, and the countless letters he wrote to a wide assortment of family, friends, and others he enlisted to help him as he worked on a four-decade project to photograph his home county. Not fifteen feet from this writing desk is the doorway into the darkroom where he worked from the mid-1970s on after moving his studio from his house on Lake Douglas Road to downtown Bainbridge. After he quit developing and printing in the darkroom he still went to his office every morning and afternoon, going home at midday for lunch with his wife, Charlotte. In 2009, just weeks before his death—Charlotte had died the year before—he was still going to the office.

      In 2010, I went to Bainbridge to help the family sort through and box up letters, notes, and journals that would join the already existing Paul Kwilecki Photographs and Papers Collection in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. I first became acquainted with Kwilecki’s work through his 1982 book Understandings. Throughout the 1990s we corresponded, and he included my work in an exhibition he curated in Georgia. In 2001 I invited him to come to Duke University to talk about his Decatur County photographic project, and sometime during that visit we began a lengthy conversation about a larger, retrospective book that might present a more comprehensive vision of his documentary work.

      While we were going through Paul’s papers I became fascinated with the excerpts of writing he had attached to his wall. Carefully typed on paper that had long ago yellowed and become brittle, was Conrad Aiken’s poem, Music I Heard with You, which begins, Music I heard with you was more than music. Next to Aiken was a page that Paul appeared to have stapled to the wall at around the same time, a photocopy from the book Approaches to Auschwitz. Paul marked in red a quote from Pierre Sauvage, a Jewish survivor: If we do not learn how it is possible to act well even under the most trying circumstances, we will increasingly doubt our ability to act well even under less trying ones. . . . If hope is allowed to seem an unrealistic response to the world, if we do not work towards developing confidence in our spiritual resources, we will be responsible for producing in due time a world devoid of humanity—literally.

      Those who knew Paul can readily locate familiar veins, recognizable tributaries, running from the ideas on his wall to his own philosophies of life and art. While he earned a reputation for holding firmly to his point of view, for too long some might argue, it could never be said that Paul stopped educating himself, stopped allowing his perspective on the world to adjust and deepen. He read widely, returned to the same texts and photographic subject matter often, and through his own persistent and patterned approaches, pushed and pulled himself in new directions. He was a highly complex man who, paradoxically, seemed to live an isolated, unassuming, and predictable life. It’s the photograph, or better said, the piles and piles of photographs that reveal what he saw and felt. As he wrote in a 1975 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship proposal, All these values are better seen in photographs than written about here.

      Yet over time Paul left a mysterious trail of words, phrases, and musing on his wall, adding one memorable idea to another without any clue to chronology or cause. These thoughts, inspirations, and metaphors are connected to his photographic vision of Decatur County. Just to the left of the Pierre Sauvage quote is a photocopy of a column his daughter Susan published in The Camilla Enterprise. The second in a family of four children, a son and three daughters, Susan, now a professor of religious studies in Virginia, wrote a regular column for the paper that served Mitchell County, Georgia. Later, Paul and Susan collaborated on a book about religion, Becoming Religious: Understanding Devotion to the Unseen, based on her interviews and featuring many of Paul’s images. At least five of her columns were hanging on the office wall. One, titled simply Education, makes a personal argument for a liberal arts experience, where students learn how their human ancestors have struggled, failed, and survived under many of the same conditions that will confront them.

      Struggling and surviving were abiding ideas and mantras for Paul, who often cast himself as an overlooked martyr, toiling (and bearing witness) alone, ignored and unnoticed. He felt this deeply. Susan told me that among his favorite stories were those of unrecognized geniuses, artists who died with little money or fame but who left profoundly imaginative legacies.

      Paul’s life focused around family and his own artistic and intellectual obsessions; another quotation comfortably nestled within sight of his desk chair was The Lost Wife, a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét. The third stanza begins,

      I look in the houses, when twilight narrows,

      And in each a man comes back to a woman.

      And nearby, a short excerpt from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within: There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains. An excerpt typed from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance closes with, Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most, for art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

      Directly relevant to his decades-long work, he stapled an index of his photographic series in Decatur County, Georgia, the artistic endeavor he began in the 1950s and continued refining until his death. This list includes thirty-nine of his projects, a way he often thought of his photographic process. The list starts with Tobacco Series and includes others such as Battle Quarters, Rural Churches, Factory Workers, and Mt. Zuma Baptism in the Boat Basin. Fixed to the wall beside this index was a customer receipt from the Citizens and Southern Bank in Bainbridge. Typed on the reverse is what seems a list of six things to do, with the fourth item left blank:

      BNBank

      Public Library

      College Library

      Elizabeth and Charlotte

      Home

      What is the blank for? A place for the unanticipated or improvisational? Something forgotten but soon to be recalled and recorded?

      The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical, he typed from Albert Einstein. It is the power of all true art and science. And next to Einstein, Paul affixed an extract from William Carlos Williams’s Asphodel that points most overtly to the work of his life:

      It is difficult

      To get the news from poems

      Yet men die miserably every day

      for lack

      of what is found there.

      Paul’s grandfather, Isadore Kwilecki, who started the family’s hardware business, arrived in Georgia as a young teenager, eventually settling in Bainbridge. He had first arrived in America through New York in the early 1860s with plans to join a relative and work in Savannah, Georgia. William Tecumseh Sherman had beat him to Georgia, however, and when Isadore arrived in 1865 there was nowhere to work, little to do. One account says he was in Tampa, Florida, briefly. Once in South Georgia, he moved up and down the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers selling hardware and other necessary items before settling in Bainbridge. A member of the family describes Isadore as your stereotypical Jewish peddler.

      Isadore opened a store in Bainbridge with the motto Kwilecki’s Got It. Eli Evans, writing in The Provincials about early Jewish immigrants to the South, explains that soon after their arrival, Jewish merchants came in contact with all of rural southern society. The peddler traveled and absorbed their ways, writes Evans, slowly drifting into his place as another white man. There was no other choice. The position of the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1