Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004220248
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by GREG EDWARDS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The photographs of Montgomery County's Earl Palmer evoke romantic images of Appalachia similar to those once painted with words by local-color writers such as Wise County's John Fox Jr. ("Trail of the Lonesome Pine" and "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come").
The 85-year-old Palmer has captured thousands of Appalachian images on film. Recently, he made those negatives, spanning a period of more than 50 years, available to scholars at Virginia Tech.
Jean Haskell Speer, director of the Appalachian Studies Program at Tech, has compiled 120 pictures, representing different phases of Palmer's work, into an intriguing volume. Speer introduces the photographs with a cautionary 35-page discussion of Palmer's stylized images of Appalachia.
Palmer is a sort of Norman Rockwell with a camera. He shows us the good old days - in this case the good old Appalachian days - as he would like us to remember them, not as they necessarily were. No striking coal miners or starving people inhabit his pictures. (The picture of a little Kentucky boy helping his father dig coal from a mountainside does, however, tread on the edge of such suffering.) Mountain life, as depicted in Palmer's pictures, is rooted in isolation, tradition, self-sufficiency, deep religious beliefs and close ties to nature. Speer notes that Palmer focuses on these and other cultural qualities in the captions he has written for his pictures.
"He chooses images he describes as `packed with Appalachia' and rejects those that `don't look the part,' " Speer observes.
Palmer's romantic approach to his subject matter was dictated, in part, by economics. "Earl's motives for arranging events and choosing subjects sprang partly from his desire to be commercially successful with his photography," Speer says.
"Historians, folklorists, and other scholars devoted to faithful rendition of culture may criticize Earl for fostering and fortifying romantic stereotypes about the region and for creating local color in photography and writing," Speer writes. "But Earl has felt obliged to beautify and idealize Appalachia because he is an artistic and commercial photographer, not a scholarly observer of culture."
Palmer was born in Straight Creek Hollow, a mining camp in Eastern Kentucky, in 1905.
His foster mother helped sow the seeds for his interest in photography by helping the 7-year-old Palmer save the signatures from 27 Arbuckle coffee containers to redeem for a simple camera. The bite of the shutterbug has itched him ever since.
After attending Union College in Barbourville, Ky., and earning a teaching certificate from the Eastern Kentucky Normal School (now state university), Palmer went to work for the A&P grocery store chain in the 1920s. When World War II broke out, Palmer was manager of an A&P store in Middlesboro, Ky.
Palmer was indicted for selling sugar to a moonshiner. He had always felt compassion for moonshiners, whose illegal activity he viewed as a simple effort to put food on the table during a tough time.
Mad at the A&P management for not standing behind him (he says he was only following their instructions to get rid of unsalable sugar), Palmer moved to the former town of Cambria in Montgomery County and opened his own country store. He wound up serving six terms as mayor of the town before it was swallowed by Christiansburg.
Speer has arranged Palmer's pictures into seven different categories, including portraits, country scenes, mountain work and mountain rituals. The first 13 pictures in a section titled "Eternal Mountaineer" feature the late Newton Hylton, who at 84 still worked eight-hour days in his blacksmith shop.
Palmer's picture of Hylton working on an ox yoke with a drawknife illustrates the photographer's manipulation of his subject to create just the right image. Two other ox yokes in various stages of completion are posed in the photograph in an unnatural way. But they do help complete the story the picture seeks to tell.
Palmer's pictures of Hylton may be the best in the collection. Hylton - a subsistence farmer, blacksmith, leather tanner, banjo maker and player, wood carver, wheelwright and herb gatherer - typified the Appalachian mountaineer for Palmer, Speer says.
"One of the most apparent features of Earl's photographic collection is the consistency of his rhetorical vision, the strong argument he presents that Appalachia is a place of serenity that spawned a culture of remarkable self-sufficiency." The Hylton pictures are true to that vision.
Speer observes that Palmer's pictures ignore the modern mountaineer in favor of the mountaineer as an everlasting ideal. And assuming you feel that's an ideal worth preserving, therein lies the value of Palmer's photographs.
by CNB