The Appalachian Photographs of Earl Palmer (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Opinions and Reviews Jean Haskell Speer. The Appalachian Photographs of Earl Palmer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. 175 pages. $29.00. This book, based on three years of interviews between Jean Speer and Earl Palmer, introduces us to the work of one photographer and his vision of Appalachia . Speer, a folklorist and director of the Appalachian Studies Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, has utilized the work of such photographic critics as Roland Barthes, Christopher Lyman, and Susan Sontag in exploring the artistic and documentary tensions found in Palmer's work. The question that Speer asks is this: What happens when Earl Palmer, who regards himself as "essentially a mountain man, a mountain photographer," proceeds to "conjure" Appalachia through his camera lens? Palmer's early photographic work documented a variety of historical processes such as basket-making, moonshining, and quilting. The post-World War II rise in travel and tourism also prospered his work, which was regularly featured in such magazines as Scenic South, Travel Magazine, and Mountain Life &1 Work. Another characteristic of Palmer's photography was his evocative captions which often featured various forms of traditional mountain speech that reinforced the interpretation Palmer sought for his images. This strong personal style is the foundation for what Speer terms Palmer's "Appalachianness ," his perceptions of his own people of the mountains: "The mountains and their people and their way of life that they lived is all the glory I want for me." It is because of this sense of Appalachianness, Speer argues, that Palmer's photography cannot be examined solely as either artistic creations or documentary images. Instead, we are presented with a vision ofAppalachia unspoiled by modernity or unpleasantness, an Appalachia of traditional values and folkways that "conjures" the metaphorical view of the region presented by photographers such as Baynard Wooten or Doris Ulmann and in the writings of John Fox, Jr., or Mary Murfree. Speer suggests, then, that Palmer's altering of photographs (inserting a split-rail fence in a landscape, for example) is not merely artistic, but the use of an icon expressive of Palmer's vision ofAppalachia. In the end, Speer convincingly argues, the photographs presented in this book give us insight into a region that is at once historically real and eternally mythic. —Shannon H. Wilson 64 ...