Faulkner's World The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (review)

Faulkner's World The Photographs ofMartinJ. Dain Edited by Tom Rankin University of Mississippi Press, 1997 112 pp. Cloth, $40.00 Reviewed by Christopher Brookhouse, editor of Hitchcock Annualand author of The Light Between the Fields, a collection of poetry from Signal Books, 1998. Faulkner's Worldis a book to admire. It begins with a nostalgic foreward by novelist Larry Brown, a gende piece about the changing appearance of Oxford, Mississippi , and Lafayette County. Tom Rankin foUows with "Evoking WilUam Faulkner," an account of Martin Dain's fascination with Faulkner's writings and how Dain, in the course of his career as a photographer, came to Mississippi to record the world Faulkner knew, to evoke the writer "through more than two hundred black-and-white photographs accompanied by occasional text from Faulkner's writing." Despite the book's merits, this combination of images and quotations is unsatisfying . Some thirty years later, the place having changed as Brown eloquendy reminds us, the photographs do not evoke so much as document the local world that Faulkner saw and recreated in his imagination. Furthermore, the pictures seem to be about Dain as much as Faulkner—what Dain selected, how he shot it, how he printed it. Dain photographed residents and business people, the courthouse square, children at school, scenes ofrural Ufe, church, and jail, as weU as activities such as sorghum-making and deer hunting. Aldiough Faulkner Umited Dain's access to him, the photographer stiU managed to take those memorable pictures of the author wearing his tattered jacket, entering or closing the smaU door of his barn, hand-hewn timbers rising above and evidencing an enduring past. Dain's camera is respectful not only of the writer, but of almost everyone else. He stands close enough to picture people going about their work, does not intrude on their private moments, records his subjects with dignity and fairness. His images of blacks, of which there are many, reveal Dain's sympathy for their struggles. In one photograph, a woman in sneakers and a diin dress draws a pail of water from a weU, an American flag draped on a fence behind her. Certainly the image comments on America, but it also aUows the woman to be herself. The picture does not place her in a manipulated context, and she does not exist in the picture to serve an idea. In short, the photographer does not appropriate her. 90 southern cultures, Fall 1999 : Reviews Mrs. Bond, a smiUng black woman, watches her children in front of the remains of an antebeUum house (the now-demoUshed Jones-Müler home). They appear comfortable with Dain's presence and perhaps even enjoy his being there. (Contrast this with Thomas Hines's William Faulkner and the TangiblePast, anotherwork I recommend, in which the Bonds pose poUtely in front of the same house, but at a distance, for a different photographer . As if observing an intruder, one reticent subject almost conceals herself as she peers from a doorway.) In another portrait, reminiscent of Margaret Bourke-White's work, a black woman wearing an old coat and a dark cap stands with a lard bucket over her arm. Her fingers hold the coat closed. She gazes offinto die distance. The clean, simple Unes of the door and porch behind her create a reading for us ofher Ufe, its plain, useful toil. And there is the extraordinary portrait of a white school child shyly smiling. She stands in her coat and dress by the stove in the schoolroom. Two letters appear on the front of the stove: "U" and "S". Yet Dain's encounter with a group ofwhite men at a deer camp reveal the photographer's occasional discomfort with his subjects. His unease is evident in pictures ofhunters with their backs turned or their unfriendly stares fixed on the camera. Somethingis missing here, some visual record ofwhat the hunt meant to the hunters, some indication of their love of ritual, not merely evidence of their fondness for guns, cards, and drink, or their distrust of the picture-maker. Almost all ofthe photographs in Faulkner's Worldappeared in Faulkner's County (Random House, 1964) and have been reprinted in this...