© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview O-0038, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Billy E. Barnes became a photographer during the late 1950s, following a tour of duty in the Korean War and his return to college in North Carolina. Barnes begins the interview with a brief discussion of his initial interest in photography and his first job with McGraw-Hill Publishing Company in New York City and in Atlanta, Georgia. After working for McGraw-Hill for several years and establishing a reputation for himself as a documentary photographer, Barnes returned to North Carolina to work for the North Carolina Fund (1964-1968), an offshoot of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Barnes argues that as a photographer for the North Carolina Fund, he was able to lend a human face to the Fund's more impersonal collecting of statistics about the experiences of impoverished people in North Carolina. According to Barnes, his photographs documented the lives of impoverished people as part of a larger effort to debunk negative myths and stereotypes about welfare and poor people. He explains that he always strove to depict the strength, dignity, and pride of his subjects, and offers several anecdotes about some of his favorite photographs, which he explains told stories about the private, everyday lives of poor people. In addition, Barnes speaks at length about the widespread dissemination of his photographs in both local and national media, as well as its use by the Office of Economic Opportunity. Most of the interview focuses on Barnes's work with the North Carolina Fund, but he also discusses changing technologies for photography, the influence of other photographers, and his broader views on the principles of photography.
Billy E. Barnes became a photographer in the late 1950s and worked for the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company for several years before going to work for the North Carolina Fund (1964-1968). Barnes devotes most of this interview to a discussion of his work as a documentary photographer for the North Carolina Fund, paying particular attention to his effort to humanize impoverished people as part of the broader War on Poverty.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Elizabeth Gritter. I'm recording an interview with Billy Barnes
at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on November 6, 2003.
So how do you want to start?
Well, like I e-mailed you, it seems like an under-explored angle of the Fund is discussions about the photography and so I'm really curious about that. I've been doing some reading on photography. So just sort of focusing the interview around that. [Gritter motions to a scrapbook of Barnes.] I saw that, yeah, there's a lot about the radio controversy in that scrapbook that I think will be useful. So I thought that would be a good starting point. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole interview is just about photography. So, I was wondering how you got interested in photography.
Gee. I think I first got interested in photography when I was traveling with the Marine Corps here and there. I couldn't afford a decent camera. My wife gave me a camera that her family had had, and I carried it around with me until it literally fell apart. It fell into pieces one day while I was aboard a ship. I knew that it couldn't be fixed. I knew that I couldn't afford to have it fixed. So, I took the film out of it and dumped it in the ocean. But I still had the interest.
When I was in school—. When I came back from the Marine Corps and my wife and I decided it would be a good idea for me to finish college. I had completed one year before going in. We had one child by then, and we literally couldn't find a place to live in Chapel Hill because this place was flooded with Korean War veterans. We couldn't find housing. So, I decided to move to Greensboro and go to Guilford College for a quarter. They were on a quarter system then. And so I did. We did. While I was in Greensboro, I really got the photo bug. I managed to buy a little camera. It was really a hard camera mechanically but it had very good optics. I went to the Greensboro Library and I read every book they had—which was a lot—I read every book and magazine that they had on the subject. When I got to Chapel Hill, I didn't have quite as much time when I was here because I had three part-time jobs. But I continued my interest in photography and read the stuff at the library every chance I got.
So when I finished school and went to work for McGraw-Hill Publishing
Company as a magazine writer, I had an incredible amount of head
knowledge. I just didn't have a camera that was a professional level
camera. So one day I had an assignment out in New Jersey. I don't
remember exactly what the assignment was. I said to my editor, "Look, I
know the magazine owns a really nice
Then, a year later when I left New York and was transferred to Atlanta to work for the same company in their news bureau, we were their eyes and ears—we were McGraw-Hill magazines's eyes and ears in the Southeast. We covered seven states, I think it was. I bought some photographic gear of my own and started shooting all of my own stuff. I was very popular with the editor because my writing was fine but.the fact that they didn't have to hire a photographer to go with me everywhere I went was very appealing to the editor of these magazines because every three or four hundred dollars you can save is three or four hundred dollars profit. So, I got a lot of experience during that five years in Atlanta and one year in New York.
So, in '64, when I moved here to Chapel Hill from Atlanta, I said to
George Esser, when I came up for an interview, "One of the things that
I'm interested in doing should you hire me or should I want to be
hired—if we're able to make a deal. One of the things I am really
interested in doing is some documentary photography of what are the
problems and what is this organization trying to do about them. So, as I
told you earlier, George fully agreed that I would be able to do that
and that I would be able to do that on the North Carolina Fund's nickel.
Now, they never bought me any equipment. I did buy with my budget a
camera for some members of my staff to use when they were going
He not only never complained, he highly approved of the fact that I was
building a photo library. We had journalists come in early in the quote
War on Poverty years. We had journalists come in especially from places
on the East Coast. We had a guy come in from the Wall
Street Journal. The Ford Foundation frequently sent journalists
down to—. Because we were their grantee, they sent journalists down to
see what was going on in the War on Poverty in North Carolina. We got a
lot of attention from the Charlotte newspapers because their editor was
on our board, a guy named Pete McKnight. When they would come to do a
piece, I would always have more photography in the file than they
needed. [Barnes points to a folder of newspaper clippings on the North
Carolina Fund.] If you look through these clippings and my personal
library of Fund stuff in the Southern Historical Collection, you'll see
that those pictures used over and over again. I won't say because they
were magnificent pictures. Part of it was because they were there. They
were there, and they did the job that was needed by publications. So,
they came to be published very widely during that period.
I think I told you about the guy from the Library of Congress [who]
called me. By the way, I remembered—. The last time we talked, we talked
about—. I told you what amuses me about what a big deal I—. It didn't
make me feel like a big deal. Really, it made me feel very humble to be
included when the Smithsonian put together an exhibit on the War on
Poverty. They used one or two or three of my photographs. They printed a
little guide to the exhibit. They printed zillions of them and sent me
half a dozen. My before Margaret
Bourke-White's, which tickled me and made me feel very humble to be in
such company. And a guy from the Library of Congress called and asked
whether I would send a selection of my photographs for possible
inclusion in a permanent portfolio. So, I kept shooting and amassed this
incredible 30 to 40,000
Since the Fund went out of business, I have sold those photographs—which are now copyrighted in my name—from time to time but the older they get the more in demand they seem to be. Actually, the first ten or fifteen years, there really was very little interest in them. I think that was partly because the media was so focused on the Vietnam War. The War on Poverty was ancient history, and something that went out of vogue when Lyndon Johnson said he wasn't going to run again. So, that's a long answer to the way I kind of metamorphosed into having photography be just as important to me both income-wise and aesthetic-wise as writing was. Actually, I was first hired out of college as a magazine writer. I've done an enormous amount of writing since then, some of which went along with my photography and some of which didn't. I've done a good bit of photography that didn't go with a story I had written. But, probably half of the time, it was a package of photographs and words.
These photo essays—was that when you were at McGraw Hill and after you
left too? When were you doing the pictures? I didn't express myself very
clearly. You said the writing and the photography so that when you were
at McGraw Hill you were
Yes. Yes.
And who was that—.
Not on the same subject.
Right.
I did some travel writing for various travel magazines. And, I did a whole lot of—. For some reason or other, I've always been interested in business. I've never wanted to be really involved in it. But I've always been interested in business, especially in manufacturing. I think this came from my McGraw Hill experience. Most of the magazines I worked for at McGraw Hill had to do with making something. I really liked to see machines and people doing stuff and making stuff especially if it was stuff that was really useful or really good to eat—worthwhile stuff. I covered mining stories and saw mining machines at work. I remember doing stories on a Lay's Potato Chip plant there just outside of Atlanta. You might think making potato chips would be boring but putting potato chips in a bag and blowing it up with air so that the bag is stiff enough so that the potato chips aren't in little bitty pieces by the time they get in your kitchen—that requires a very intricate machine. Things like that interested me although I have no mechanical ability whatsoever. I admire seeing interesting gadgets that work.
Because of that interest and the ability I developed to write about
business and manufacturing, I have written a lot of stores and done a
lot of photography in American industry. I was a consultant for I-B-M
for sixteen years in the '90s, in the '80s. There
I did some construction stories. I love construction because I like to be outdoors. How really big buildings are put together always interested me. The people in the construction business—. The construction business is the last great crapshoot in American business and industry because you're dealing with the weather and you're dealing with—. The construction business, the onsite work, is still run largely by people who never spent a day in college. They're gruff, muscular men who worked their way up through and through the construction business and learned it on the job. They're just fascinating people. It's a great piece of Americana to spend the day with a construction stiff, you know. So, I loved the construction work. Okay, next question.
So that after the North Carolina Fund you did freelance work—.
Yeah, I did everything. I did business and I did travel. The only thing I
didn't do much of—. I never but once or twice had an advertising shoot.
I just didn't shoot that kind of picture. I now have a collection,
including the North Carolina Fund stuff, of about 120,000 photographs.
Well, I forgot to say that during the '70s I was Time
magazine's—what they call a stringer—freelancer in North Carolina. I
remember shooting the Vietnam peace protests and the tail end of the
Black Power Movement—protests and marches. I shot a lot of pictures of
college professors who had written books Time magazine and Jesse Helms's
campaigns for the Senate and all kinds of stuff.
I ran into a problem in the '70s. The magazine world at that time was
making the transition from being illustrated by all black and white
photographs to all color photographs. But there was a time about six
years in between, in the middle of that transition, when every
assignment I got from Time magazine, I had to shoot in
both black and white and color. Well, that drives you nuts. It means to
begin with you have to carry two cameras: one loaded with black and
white film and one loaded with color. Well, they shoot at different film
speeds. I was always grabbing the wrong camera in the heat of the moment
when something was happening that I didn't want to miss. Grabbing the
wrong camera even though I had them labeled on top where I could read
it. I would grab the wrong camera and shoot the picture at the wrong
exposure. It was a mess. Also, I didn't know how to shoot color because
I had never shot any color. Everything I shot for the North Carolina
Fund and everything I shot for McGraw-Hill before that for six years was
in black and white because magazine editors weren't interested in color.
They were interested in it but the technology hadn't advanced to where
it was an affordable thing to do.
I also found that I used to—. When I had cheaper cameras because I couldn't afford the best that money can buy, if I screwed up an assignment, I could always say, "Well, you know, if I had a better camera, I could be just as good as Henri Cartier-Bresson." But then I got the best camera money can buy, and I still wasn't as good as the great American and European photographers. So, I had no excuse, see. So that took all my excuses away. So, I had nothing to blame it on but me if they weren't up to par. But, anyway, I have really enjoyed photography.
I am a rarity in that I never enjoyed lab work. I've developed two rolls of film in my life, and I screwed both of them up. When I was at Mc-Graw Hill, I quickly came to the conclusion that I am not psychologically-equipped to spend long hours at midnight in a smelly room full of chemicals sticking my hands into acid. There are so many good labs around the country that can process film for a reasonable price that I—. After I went into freelance where I had to pay my own bills, I realized that the money, the income, is in the shooting of the picture—not in the lab work. Aesthetically, if I had been a real artist, I would have insisted on doing my own lab work because all great photographers do. But I just didn't want to do it. For one thing, I didn't have here in my home, where my office has always been, a place to do it. You know, it's environmentally nasty, it smells bad, and it requires a whole lot of plumbing. So, I have shipped out stuff all of my photographic life to labs to have it done.
Now, God has smiled upon me and allowed me to live long enough to have a
digital camera that shoots just as good a picture as a film camera. So,
I haven't bought a roll of film of any kind in the last three or four
years. That's very emancipating to be able to—. When I was shooting
color film, exclusively, eight years ago, every time my
Uh huh.
Okay. Well, writing a twelve-page magazine article used to be—. Really it
was such an onerous task because if you decided after your first draft,
all of the drudgery—out of it and left
the fun part. I love to write but I didn't like to re-write. I didn't
like the Snopaque routine and to
You shot 35 mm—.
Yeah.
For the North Carolina Fund?
Yeah.
Okay. So, you're a self-taught photographer.
Yes, absolutely.
You've never had any training in photography?
I think I went one time to what's called a Nikon school. It's a one-day
workshop that they bring around all over the country. That's the only
formal training that I can ever remember having. It was very helpful.
But, yeah, most everything else I learned I learned from making
mistakes. I've written an
What do you like about photography?
I like to—. I love to look at people. I mean what's more interesting than
people? It's been a great mystery to me why as a society we are
forbidden to look at people unless we're talking to them. You get on a
bus or subway or train and if you look at somebody that you find
interesting looking, you know, somebody may slap you or call a cop. And
yet there's nothing more interesting—squirrels,
Another thing I like about photography is that it satisfies a creative urge I've always had. I've always wanted to be able to draw. I almost—. Except for a little bit of cartooning, I have no drawing ability whatsoever. I have no drafting ability. I have a friend who went all the way through school with me who from about the third grade had more drafting ability than the average 40-year-old graphic artist. I mean that little sucker could draw anything and it would look like something that you saw in a magazine. I was so jealous. I really think that one reason that I felt compelled to learn something like photography is because I wanted to be able to record images and I couldn't write, I couldn't draw, I couldn't paint. So, that's kind of an oblique answer to your question.
Why did you use photography to such an extent in promoting the North Carolina Fund and doing the work of the Public Information Department as opposed to doing more press releases or more films or other means of communication?
Well, partly, because it's something I really felt I like knew how to do because of my McGraw-Hill experience and my general photographic experience. But I justified it—the expense and the time I was spending—in this way: You can write all you want to about people's problems. Until you see the people you're talking about—until you see their faces and see how they're dressed and see the looks on their faces, the children, the adults, the homes they live in, and see that A) they're human beings, the type that God loves just as much as He loves anybody else, just as much as He loves the president of the United States. There's beauty there. It's just been beat up on a little bit. Until you see these faces—I don't think until you have faces that go with the statistics about how many poor people there are and the statistics about median income and stuff and discrimination and all that—I think it really lacks impact. Because you can think, "Well, they're talking about somebody who lives in Lithuania."
But, to show, especially the communities that we helped try to get their antipoverty programs off the ground, I developed a core of pictures. Then if we needed a slide program for Charlotte or for Rocky Mount, I would develop a whole lot of local pictures that obviously were in local places that these people could look at and see. You know, "This is something in my community that I've never seen. I didn't especially want to see it. But, dang, I drive within four blocks of that place every day." I think, well, "A picture is worth a thousand words." In many ways, that's true. So, I felt that if we had a library of photographs from which to draw—and this is something we could offer to the media and also use for our own use and could use it in little neighborhood presentations—that this would be at least as effective as all the words we could crank out with whatever kind of copying machine we had at the time.
I know we talked about public relation efforts are hard to measure. Did you see concrete instances or concrete examples of the impact of these photographs on communities, on people?
No, I don't know that I did because it's just like all of our other efforts. It's hard to document the changing of people's minds or the awakening of people's minds. However, I guess one way to gauge not the effectiveness but whether these were photographs were worth doing was the extent to which the media used them. [Barnes motions to a scrapbook of newspaper clippings on the Fund.] When you look in these scrapbooks, you'll see that when the Winston-Salem paper decided to do an opening front page of one of their Sunday sections on the War on Poverty, there'd be more space taken up with pictures than words. I think that to some degree is a measure of whether the effort and expense that we expended on these photographs—and keeping a file of them and knowing where they are, and keeping a log of every roll that was shot, and keeping a file of contact sheets, of proof sheets—was worthwhile. I think that was one measure of it. They were used. They were widely used. They were used by the national War on Poverty effort. They were almost always used by reporters who would come in to see what we were doing. So, I think that's about the only way you could measure. You knew that they weren't just sitting in a file. They were out there being used. They were being seen by anyone who flipped through the paper that morning.
How were they used by the O-E-O besides in the traveling photography exhibit?
Oh gosh, the pictures of the North Carolina Volunteers, I remember, were
used extensively in all the O-E-O recruiting materials for VISTA for
years and years. O-
You were saying in the last interview that you did similar tactics with your own program in terms of giving them to people in communities to show that it wasn't a subversive program what you were doing. You were doing tutoring and health programs and—.
Exactly.
So forth. Who were you worried about? Who were you fighting against? Who would think that it would be a subversive program?
Well, there are people in our society—maybe more so then than now, though
I'm not sure of that—who pride themselves on being self-made people.
Well, I'll give you an example in the Congress, Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm,
as I understand it, his mother
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Show that these poor people are people who will participate in job
training if we offer it to them. Teenagers who will work there buns off
laying water lines and cleaning windows at schools in the summer time if
they're offered a job through
And I saw too that with your movies, you often used stills in the movies, and I was wondering why you employed that technique instead of just rolling the camera?
Part of it had to do with money. We had the stills already. My
photography career with the North Carolina Fund was full of serendipity.
Many of those situations were situations that would have been very hard
to find something that compelling and shoot it with a movie camera for
several reasons. One is just because you wouldn't know
What did you say to the people? How did you, you know, become a nonthreatening presence in their home? You talked last time about having a field worker take you out—a case worker. So, if you could talk some more about how you ingratiated yourself.
That's the secret. The secret is to have a trusted person take you around
and say, "I know you like our program. You prove what we're doing, and
you're enrolled in our adult education program. We're delighted to have
you. This guy is helping us tell the story of how well this program is
working. Do you mind if he stays here while I'm
[Shakes her head to indicate he had not told her the story.]
Well, I had a chance to go to Africa in 1988 and visit some friends of mine who were over there doing community development work. Some very—. I don't know why I can't think of the right word. They weren't savages. They were living in some very undeveloped areas of South Africa in small villages. They were round homes, some of which had thatched roofs and some of which had tin roofs. They had cow dung floors. Cow dung makes wonderful floors. Did you ever see any?
[Shakes her head to indicate she has not seen any such floors.]
When that stuff dries it's just as hard as a rock. It's dark brown. It's impervious to water. If you spill something on it, it just kind of runs off. It's like linoleum but a lot cheaper. It doesn't smell at all. Even when it gets wet, it doesn't smell once it's dried up. Anyway, I got off on a tangent.
I knew I wanted to
I got over there and the people over there had never had—. Lots of them
had never had their pictures taken and they just begged to have their
pictures taken. I was out with a friend walking along the valley one
day, and this little boy came up and said, "My grandpa wants to know
whether you'll come take his family's picture." I said, "Well, sure." I
got there, and there were about fourteen of them. They ranged in age
from tiny babies to this man who must have been in his eighties. They
were all dressed up in their best finery—not costumes like the kind you
see in National Geographic but plain old clothes.
Well, some of them wore interesting headdresses. They just wanted their
pictures taken—everywhere I went. I never had anybody shy. I would go to
the spring where the women got water and put it in huge, huge, huge
plastic buckets and carried them on their heads as they walked these
hills. They loved it.
So, when I got back home, I had prints made of these pictures—small
prints made. I sent them back to my friends over there and said,
"Distribute these among the people." When I next talked to them, they
said the one that you took of that big family. They said they passed
those pictures around, and they kept saying, "Man, that guy must be
good." He says, "That mountain behind the house looks exactly like our
mountain." They didn't understand that it was a mechanical, chemical
process. They thought I had somehow done that picture myself. Well, I
did, but I did it with a gadget. They thought it was the same as if I
had painted the picture. They were astounded that it looked just like
their home and their faces and their mountains.
Well, everywhere I went when I was working for the Fund, the children
especially—. The adults were usually so delighted to have somebody
interested enough in them as individuals to want to take their picture.
But, they didn't express it as ebulliently
Actually, I have found this same syndrome among middle-class people. I've been in situations at I-B-M where I would need to take a picture of four people working at some job. One of the women would say, "Oh, no. You can't take my picture. My hair looks bad today." I'd say, "Well, okay. That's okay. Just step over here to the side and I'll just—." "Well, no, if you really want to."
That happened over and over and over again. She didn't want to be left
out but she wanted to protest just a little bit. I didn't want to put
any pressure on them. I would occasionally have somebody who really was
so self conscious they didn't want to be in the picture, but three out
of four times they would change their minds. "No, well, no. I don't want
to mess things up. I'll just stay and be in the picture." But, I can't
think of a single instance during the '60s that I ran into any
resistance to being photographed. Most of the time they considered it a
compliment that the person I was with, the field worker, had thought of
them as an example of someone who is interested in being involved in the
programs or whatever. This is someone who is paying some attention to
Now, there were times when I would go alone, or with one of my people into an area, and it would take considerably longer to try to explain what we were doing and get them relaxed, but it almost always worked. I don't ever recall running into animosity. It was usually curiosity. They would see us shooting some pictures of a row of houses or some people working in the fields. They would want to know, you know, who are you and what are you taking these pictures for? Everybody asked that—people from all walks of life—but there was never any resistance or animosity to it.
But, I think people, most people, can tell by your manner and the look on your face: Does this person respect me and is this being done with respect? Or is this being done as a matter of exploitation? I think people can sense that. I don't care whether you've been to college or not. I think there's something built in to us where we can sense what people's motives are and whether this is a person who really has some respect for me and is going to photograph me or write about me with respect. Or is this just some hotshot from New York who has blown in and is going to spend five minutes here getting what he was sent down here to do and leave, and I'm just another object. I think in male-female relationships you can tell very quickly whether somebody sees you as an interesting person or just as a sex object or an object of your exertion of power or whatever. So, it's all the same game.
I have tremendous respect for everybody I've ever photographed,
especially in the Fund days. That's one of the reasons that I was always
known as an editorial photographer as opposed to an advertising
photographer—because there was not much
You were saying before, in the last interview, that you thought it was a sin to pose people and you never told anyone to stand here or sit here.
That's right.
Why did you think it was a sin to pose people?
It was because I had read too many photography books about people who felt that way. And actually the kind of work I was doing at the time—I think it was a good thing that I felt that way. I also think it's a good thing that I didn't come in with three bags of lights and stuff. I'm not even sure I owned a flashgun for most of the time I was working for the North Carolina Fund. Some of these pictures are what people would think is grainy. But they're all shot with natural light which is another reason—. Too much equipment can be intimidating even if the photographer is not. And, it's just me and that little bitty thing, that little bitty camera. So, I lost my train of thought, but did I answer your question?
Okay.
Who were some of the photographers that influenced you or who are some of the ones you admire?
I admire—. What's the name of the guy who shot the pictures for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?
Walker Evans.
Walker Evans. Thank you. I always admire his work, and my work has been compared to his by people who know who Walker Evans is and who have seen my work. I like Henri Cartier-Bresson's work because a lot of it has a touch of humor in it. And also Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange's photography. All of the people who worked for Stryker during the Farm Security Administration years during the Depression, if you're familiar with that group of photographers. All of them were—. I admired their photography a great, great deal. I discovered their photography when I was trying to learn how to shoot pictures. They've all—. All of that collection of photographs has influenced me a great deal.
Yeah, I noticed when I was doing some research on photography for this interview that there were so many parallels between your work and the FSA work—.
Yeah.
How they did the similar thing of giving pictures to communities to show it wasn't a subversive program—.
Hm. Hm.
And win political support—.
Hm. Hm.
I also noticed that your pictures were similar to Walker Evan's and so forth—.
Yeah.
Who has compared you to Walker Evans?
Well, the legendary teacher in journalism who for a while was the
managing editor of the Chapel Hill newspaper. Now, I got to think of his
name. I can't think of anybody but his boss's name. Shoot. He died about
three years ago. Shumaker. Did you ever read the comic strip Shoe?
Okay. Shoe is—. McNelly who is now dead. He's a way younger fellow than I
am. Jeff McNelly who drew that strip worked for Jim Schumaker when
McNelly was in school at U-N-C. He drew editorial cartoons for the Chapel Hill Weekly, and he drew editorial cartoons for
the Tar Heel at the same time. He nearly started to
work for the Chapel Hill Weekly, and he was so good he
was quickly snatched away by, I believe, the Chicago
Tribune. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartoon
work. Well, Jim Shumaker said to me one time in a conversation that
every time he saw one of my photographs he thought of Walker Evans. And
several other people—and I don't remember who they are—have said that.
It's a great compliment to be mentioned in the same breath with Walker
Evans.
As far as the posing is concerned, I learned in later years that if
you're going to work for a publication that has a deadline you have to
do some Look
magazine, and mine wasn't. So Look magazine back then,
along with Life, were the two premier magazines that
used a great deal of editorial photography in those days.
I was looking at a book of oral histories of Life
photographers, and one of them commented that sometimes photographers
realize that they have missed opportunities—that they'll see something
and think, "That could have been a picture if only I had a camera with
me." I was wondering if you had things like that happen.
I don't do it so much anymore but there was a time—actually I guess it
was during the '60s and early '70s—when I was so wrapped up in
photography that I would sit in church and frame pictures of the pastor
and think, "Oh man, that would've been wonderful." Everywhere I went, if
I was visiting relatives—. For a while I started carrying a camera
everywhere I went. If you would ask my wife, she would tell you that I
still do. Actually, I almost never get in a car that I don't have a
camera in the trunk. Of course, I don't ever go on a trip without a
camera. So, I understand what the person says—that you don't want to
miss anything. There are places where just because of its bulk, you
don't carry a camera, if you're dressed in a business suit or something.
But
So, you're preventing those missed opportunities by carrying a camera around.
Right, exactly.
I ran across another quote in that book. I don't know if I wrote it down here. [Gritter looks at her notes.] Where the interviewer asks the photographers, "Aren't your pictures in some way an invasion of privacy? And he said, "Yes, but all good pictures are." So I was wondering what you would say to that.
I wouldn't say all good pictures are—not because of the
privacy part but because of the invasion part. I don't think all
pictures are an invasion. But I think the best pictures are the ones
that give a private look at a person, which is interesting because it's
a private look. It's a look that the average person doesn't see in a
day. If you take a picture of a stop sign, it's very hard to take a
compelling picture of a stop sign because it's something everybody sees
every day. It's hard to take a picture of the bell tower on the Carolina
campus that's a compelling picture because it's something that people
walk by every day. It is a challenge to be able to frame it in such a
way—with tree leaves around it and stuff and the clouds just right—so
that it's more compelling than it would otherwise be. But pictures of
people, yeah—. Even if you take a picture in the public, we have the
idea that there is a certain privacy about our bodies that is invaded if
someone takes a picture of it. So, I don't agree with the invasion part,
but I do agree with the idea that in a way there's a relationship
between the degree to which you are depicting someone in their privacy
and the degree to which the picture is compelling. If it's a
A case in point is one of my favorite Billy Barnes photographs is the
photograph—I think I showed it to you, it didn't have anything to do
with the North Carolina Fund, it was shot in the '70s—of a black man
with a hard hat on with a barber shop in the background, and there's a
big old Chevrolet next to the black man. What the story looks like to me
is the black man has just gotten off from work, and he's waiting for
somebody to pick him up. He's leaning against this post. He's kind of
tired, and behind him there is a barbershop. Through the window of a
barbershop, we see two white guys—one of them sitting in a regular chair
and one of them is sitting in the barber chair—and they're chatting.
There's this old pendulum clock on the wall, and it says a little after
five. What it does for me is it tells me a story about these three
people. There's the barber who's talking to the guy who's sitting in the
chair. His buddy who's come by from some other—. He's the jeweler down
the street. Outside there's this laborer with his hard hat on, and he's
waiting for something to happen. You got these planes of interest. The
black guy is a lot closer to you—the worker is a lot closer to you. Just
across the sidewalk behind him there's the barbershop.
I've always been fascinating with the painting called "Nighthawk[s]." I can't think now of the artist's name—.
Edward Hopper.
Okay. Hopper's "Nighthawk[s]." I love that photograph because it does the same thing. It looks through a window at people, doing what people do about 2:00 in the morning. They're chatting. They're drinking coffee. There's the guy behind the bar with his standard 1940s paper hat on. That picture has enormous appeal. It is probably one of the most famous paintings by an American artist that exists today. I see it everywhere. I saw it on the cover of an A-O-L free disk the other day in Walmart.
I ran into one of Hopper's disciples while I was doing a television piece
on him. This guy is just a Hopper freak. The guy I was interviewing is a
sculpturer. He makes these
I've met a whole lot of aggressive photographers who were intent on invading people's privacy and letting them know that their privacy was being invaded and considered people their subjects in the same sense that a king considers the peasants his subjects. These people—they want to be in the magazine or in the newspaper. "They're going to do what I tell them to do. They're going to smile when I say smile. If I tell them to take their clothes off, they're going to take their clothes off. If I tell them to change shirts, they're going to change shirts." But, I think that kind of photography gives an entirely different kind of picture which does invade people's privacy.
What—you've touched on some of this. What, to you, makes a good picture?
It's a picture that tells a story. I'll use my photographs as an example. I just told you about one that I think just tells a lovely story about the time of day in a small town where three people—two of whom have a personal connection and the other one doesn't—are all in the same scene, doing what people do about ten minutes after five. There's even a clock in there that tells you what time it is. It's an exquisite piece of serendipity.
The picture of Miss Mary that I showed you—of the little old African
American woman in the rocking chair. The first thing you see is this
smile—this incredibly glowing,
Another example is the picture of the woman sitting on her little caravel bed, and the child has come over to her and laid her cheek on her mother's knee. Do you remember that one?
I walked into the front door of this house, and there it was revealed to
me. I didn't even ask. I guess the worker I was with said, "Mrs. So and
So. We came to visit you, and he's getting some pictures." But I
realized that if I didn't get to work, that situation was going to be
gone. To me, it was clear at the time—and I hope it's clear in the
picture—that she's real sleepy eyed, and she's kind of still not very
with it because she just got up. Her hair is all frazzled, and she's in
a nightgown. I think just before I got there this little child had
toddled in and awakened her. I think Grandma was back in the kitchen
making breakfast. And the little child—time for her mama to get up—she
I think a picture has got to tell a story. The first thing a photograph has to have is a center of interest. If you look at a photograph and you don't know where your eye is supposed to focus, then it's a sorry photograph. I don't care whether it's a landscape or a street scene or a group shot. Well, I won't say it's a sorry photograph. It's a very ordinary photograph unless there's something central that the eye cannot resist focusing on. Then, after it feasts on that sight—often it's a face—for a while, then it begins to see the context. The perfect picture, in my way of thinking, is a picture that tells a story. Like the little freckled-face boy with the home-made wagon. Here's this little kid who's obviously not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He lives out in the country because there's a barn behind him. He's got the tongue of this wagon that looks like it was put together by Rube Goldberg. You know, it's got an old plank here and an old plank there and an old wagon wheel here. You could probably write a short story about that. In fact, someone once bought a batch of my photographs to be used in high school texts that was an exercise in short story writing. The kids were to take these ten photographs, pick their favorite photograph, and write a short story about the person or people in the picture. That's, I think, is the ideal photograph.
What was your typical process of going and shooting these documentary photographs? I know you went there with a third party. How many exposures did you usually shoot to get the shot that you wanted?
I would say that I usually shot at least a roll of pictures—that's 36
exposures—in any situation where I had the feeling that this is not just
an ordinary piece
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Repeat. Backtrack a little bit. That was so great.
There are situations where you go in, and it's as if you work for a newspaper. They're having a jump-roping contest at a local park and you need to get a picture of some kids jumping rope. You need to get back and make it on time for your deadline. It's a very cut and dry sort of thing. You get a decent picture. You compose it decently. You expose it decently. You come back with something that nobody is just outrageously enthused about, but it's something that fills a hole in the newspaper or magazine or whatever. There are times when you come upon a scene and everything is right. It tells a story. It has a center of interest. It has emotion. It has people in it who are beautiful people—and I don't mean Hollywood beautiful but I mean beautiful in the way they express their faces and their body language expresses their own selves and their own lives. The hair stands up on the back of your neck, your heart needs to brace, and you realize this is a golden opportunity. "Please Lord, help me have all of the buttons on the camera sit just right so I don't blow this one." Then you start to shoot. You shoot until you realize that the people are beginning to get tired of your shooting and listening to that click clack or the scene begins to fall apart in terms of their intensity.
There will almost always be one—never before than two—photographs on that
proof sheet when it comes back that are the perfect ones. I never had
any trouble figuring
I have had a few real memorable disasters. One time I was in Miami, and I
was shooting some stuff for Architectural Record
Magazine. They had brought over—. This was the annual meeting of
the American Institute of Architects at the Americana Hotel in Miami
about 1961. The editor of the magazine had brought over to be the
keynote speaker a fellow named something like P-a-o-l-i, who was the
world's most renowned architect at the time. I mean they worshipped this
guy. This guy was royalty. They set up a discussion of him with some of
the nation's leading architects in this great big hotel suite, and I was
to photograph it. I was going to be so thorough, man. This was because
to be something that I had control of. So, I went up there. At the
appointed time of meeting, I went up the day before when the sun was
coming in the same way it would be at the time of the meeting. I drew a
diagram. I took an exposure reading on every
Oh.
Of course, the meeting was over by then.
Oh, no.
I said, "I don't even know how to prove it to you. How do you prove there
wasn't any film in the camera? All I can tell you is there ain't going
to be no pictures."
We were talking earlier about your work and how it compares to Walker Evans. Were you connected at all with Al Clayton?
No.
Are you familiar with his work?
I'm not familiar with his work.
I found a book of his, and he shot photographs of people in poverty in
the 1960s and did work with Robert Coles. Some of his photographs were
what spurred the passage of some antipoverty legislation in DC, and I
saw that there were parallels between his photographs and your
photographs. Were you connected with other photographers? Were there
other people doing what you were doing in other states or also in North
Carolina? I saw that Peter Range was someone you worked with and that
John Justice also shot some photographs and Bruce Roberts
Well, Peter and John were employees of mine. Peter claims that I taught
him everything he knows about writing and photography, which is far from
the truth. He was already a splendid writer when he came to work for me.
I guess by watching me he did learn a little something about
photography. John is now a playwright, and, in fact, I had a phone
conversation with him yesterday. Both of them worked for me, and there
were times when they would shoot stuff that they were involved in and I
wasn't there, couldn't be there, whatever. Bruce Roberts lived in
Charlotte at the time, and he—. When I first came here and hadn't really
started accumulating stuff myself, I bought half a dozen pictures from
Bruce and used them in the early days with some of the work we
Were you aware of people doing that sort of work?
I was. I'm not really good at remembering names. In fact, I'm lousy at
remembering names. Images—I keep forever. My wife and I have lived in
about eighteen places since we've been married. I could draw you a
detailed floor plan of every place we lived, but I couldn't tell you
what street we lived on. If you named the names, I would remember them.
I was especially impressed with the work that the fellow did who shot
the wonderful, horrible photographs of the march when Bull Connor got
the fire trucks out and had them literally blowing these people down
with high pressure hoses. Now, I did meet a guy named Flip Shulke, who
was an important photographer during the civil rights era. I did meet
him. Actually, I met him in Miami at the same time I had my disaster. In
ensuing years, I met a few of them, but, for the most part, there
wasn't—. Let's see. I knew a guy in Atlanta named Jay Levinson—I think
his name was Jay Levinson—who did a lot of work for Time and Life. His wife was employed in the Time news bureau in Atlanta. He had done a lot of
photography with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. And
there was a guy named Bill Diehl who lived in Atlanta, and he had done a
lot of that kind of documentary photography. He later became a
novelist.
What about Danny Lyon? Do you know that name at all?
I don't.
He did photography of SNCC in the 1960s and made some forays into the art world. You had mentioned that you had had your work exhibited once at the Southern Studies gallery. Did you try to have your work exhibited other places or was this just not something you decided to pursue?
Having to do an exhibit to do an exhibit is largely an ego trip. I'm not opposed to ego trips, but they're just so damned expensive. I don't even want to think of what that exhibit that the folks in Durham did of my work cost. It's hard to get a large picture matted and framed with UV screening glass for less than seventy-five [to] a hundred dollars. You multiply that times fifty—you're talking about big money. I never had thought it was something I ought to be doing with my money. I don't know what I do with my money, but it's not that. I think I always felt if my pictures were worth displaying that somebody would come along and do it, and it wouldn't be something I would do.
My documentary photographs are not the kind of photographs that most
people want to hang in their living rooms. You know, they want to hang
happy scenes and stuff like that and colorful lighthouses and beach
scenes and stuff. I have sold a few photographs to collectors, but
mostly I have sold these documentary photographs to people who are
giving them to people who are in the business of working with low-income
people. For example, the guy who runs the Inter-Faith Council here in
town is an old friend of mine. I was a volunteer at the Inter-Faith
Council shelter for about nine years—well, the shelter and the
kitchen—and got to know him, Chris Moran, when he was the shelter
manager. Then he later went on to become the director of the whole
Inter-Faith Council operation. He called me and said he wanted to buy a
photograph to
But, I really enjoy doing things like that with the photographs more than
I would having an exhibit. I don't know. There aren't a whole lot of
places that want an exhibit like that. I would like to see this exhibit
that is gathering dust in the vault in the North Carolina Collection—.
I'd like to see it permanently mounted on the mezzanine of the social
work building over on campus. I think it would be most appropriate, and
I'd be happy to give them the exhibit. I've never approached them about
it. I should and maybe I will someday.
This is more of a delicate question. I was wondering what the emotional impact is of being a photographer of people in poverty. I mean I've done some reading and it can be very difficult to, you know, be a journalist and cover war and dismal conditions. How did you deal with that?
Well, there are several things that may be behind that questi