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

by Tom Rankin (Editor), Paul Kwilecki (Photographer), Iris Tillman Hill (With)

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469607405
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/09/2013
Series:	Documentary Arts and Culture, Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Edition description:	1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	10.40(w) x 10.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Paul Kwilecki is author of Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia. Tom Rankin is director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Iris Tillman Hill is coeditor, with Tom Rankin, of the Documentary Arts and Culture series.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

I rearrange sacred furniture. Because my brain, not my camera, is my instrument, beauty isn't enough. I'm looking at subject, not at the surface of the print, though I'm grateful when the surface turns out to be beautiful.—Paul Kwilecki



As full of riches as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Kwilecki's sustained portrayal of Decatur County is an American classic.—Alec Soth, photographer and author of From Here to There: Alec Soth's America



A masterful visual drama of life in the South. Gesture is critical to Kwilecki's eye, revealing his love for humanity.—Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers



An epic of ghostly ordinariness.—Roy Blount Jr., author of Long Time Leaving



Once you've seen these photographs, you can't forget the places or the people. Until now, Kwilecki's intensely personal and highly developed skill of recognition has gone unnoticed. That changes forever with the publication of this book.—Julian Cox, founding curator of photography and chief curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco



One Place is a deep reflection on one artist's tilling of the soil at the heart of home. But mostly, Paul Kwilecki's words and images are about time, what lasts, what doesn't. Here, we find Kwilecki's fellow sojourners in time, and Decatur County: black and white, young and old, workers and storeowners and shoppers, preachers and prisoners. People inhabiting the place they share—the place they began, the place they will end.—Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Thrall

Editorial Reviews

01/28/2013
This impressive career-spanning collection of over 200 black-and-white photos (published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University) represents Kwilecki’s four-decade attempt (until his death in 2009) to portray the nuances of his hometown of Bainbridge, Ga., where he ran the family hardware store. Kwilecki (Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County) succeeded in his efforts to create a magnificent microcosm. Whatever his focus is at a given moment—portraits of manual laborers, documenting the joy of a courthouse wedding, or ruminating on cemeteries—he clearly wished to account for all of life’s flavors. The book includes generous excerpts from Kwilecki’s thoughtful writing about his own process and the people he encountered. In addition to his thoughts on art, Kwilecki describes his ground game as a documentarian. In conveying an attempt to chronicle “the worst slum in town,” filled with crude shacks and broken-down cars, he writes that one day “a big woman was leaning on her porch railing.... I stopped, grabbed a camera, said nothing, took six or eight shots standing right in front of her... drove away.” The resulting portrait depicts a foreboding woman whose size fills the entire frame and whose gaze is like a bull deciding whether to charge. Overall, he gives dignity and grace to the predominantly working-class community. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

This impressive career-spanning collection of over 200 black-and-white photos . . . includes generous excerpts from Kwilecki's thoughtful writing. . . . He gives dignity and grace to the predominantly working-class community.—Publishers Weekly



One of the best and most important books to come from the South, ever.—Clyde Edgerton, Garden & Gun



Remarkable. . . . [Kwilecki's] extraordinary gifts are given an overdue viewing here. . . . Containing abundant memorable images by what can justifiably be called an undiscovered master, interspersed with his own eloquent writing, this is an irresistible book. Kwilecki was a picture maker who compelled his viewers to know whom he knew, and succeeded at it. A gift to all lovers of great photography, this book deserves a place in most if not all collections.—Library Journal starred review



The most comprehensive publication of . . . [Kwilecki's] prints and writings to date.—Jrnl of Southern History

From the Publisher

This remarkable, superbly edited book tells the arresting story of a heretofore little-known documentarian and ethnographer while highlighting his powerful and beautiful black-and-white photographs. Kwilecki, who died in 2009, was a self-taught artist who made his living in his family's hardware store in Bainbridge, GA. His extraordinary gifts are given an overdue viewing here: a privileged window into the small-town economies and people of the last century in the rural South. Readers are given entrée into a world of shade-tobacco farming, carnival midways, African American loggers, proud shopkeepers, jail hog killings, segregated bus stations, and rural grocery shops. Clearly, Kwilecki was not an observer on the fringes. VERDICT Containing abundant, memorable images by what can justifiably be called an undiscovered master—comparisons with Dorothea Lange and William Eggleston are apt—interspersed with his own eloquent writing, this is an irresistible book. Kwilecki was a picture maker who compelled his viewers to know whom he knew, and succeeded at it. A gift to all lovers of great photography, this book deserves a place in most if not all collections.—Douglas F. Smith, Berkley P.L.

Library Journal