Seeing the Highlands, 1900-1939: Southwestern Virginia through the Lens of T. R. Phelps

Seeing the Highlands, 1900-1939: Southwestern Virginia through the Lens of T. R. Phelps David Moltke-Hansen The camera work of T. R. Phelps has been hiding in plain view all over Washington and Russell Counties, in the westernmost tip of Virginia, for most of this century . Phelps's photographs of life there during the first four decades of the twentieth century hang on walls, fill pages of family albums, and show up in estate sales after the deaths of their subjects or their subjects' children. These hundreds of images are fragments of the lifework of a remarkable photographer. Yet Phelps himself is still almost as little noted as the estate-sale photo albums and prints of his work; before 1975 he was almost unknown. That year, his grandson, Gale Phelps, contributed a photographic essay from the collection to the August issue of the Plow, a small literary magazine. Since then, he and photographer friend Dean Barr have mounted exhibits for local festivals. In 1992, Gale Phelps deposited the family's archive of nearly two thousand plate-glass negatives at Emory and Henry College, a few miles south of the Phelps homeplace , and in 1993 the school staged a major exhibit, "The Phelps Collection: A Photographic Treasure of Washington County." The collection is valuable not only because of its size but also because it starts earlier and runs longer than most collections of mountain images. To have such a collection of images taken by a local resident to juxtapose against collections of outsiders' photographs is remarkable. To have such a collection for Appalachia is rarer still. There is more to these images than rarity, however. Phelps was technically and artistically talented, not only indigenous, and humorous as well as deft in his recording of the people, rituals, ambitions, and changes in his world. A Hidden Trove of History Born 24 November 1872 in northern Washington County, Thomas Rupert (T. R. or Tommy) Phelps lived all his life in Moccasin Gap, near the north fork of the Holston River. Because he suffered from "milk leg" (or "white swelling") and from a kneecap shattered in a sledding accident when he was a young man, he could not farm as extensively as his parents or six siblings. Instead, he ran a grist mill 24Southern Cultures and repaired watches. After ordering a camera and darkroom equipment about 1897 (perhaps from Sears), he also became a photographer. Phelps would set out on Mondays from his homeplace and spend several days driving his buggy over a circuit that took him every three weeks to Bristol and through Washington and Russell Counties. Stopping at farms along the way, he would unhitch his stallion for it to service mares while he repaired watches and shot photos. He never gave up his buggy, even though cars had nearly replaced horses by the end of his career. Phelps took an average of five images on each job, using ten of the twelve glass plates in a box on two commissions, so leaving two for "free" shots of lumber gangs, harvesters at work, or staged, sometimes comical photographs. Most of the commissioned images are of couples, children, families, large family gatherings , and school or church groups. Some are of individuals, sometimes with a favorite horse, mule, dog, ox team, or new automobile. Though recording his neighbors over nearly half a century of dramatic changes in photography, Phelps let advances in photographic technology pass him by. Early in his career, he experimented with roll film but was not successful with it in the darkroom. Thereafter, he continued to use dry plates and a three-byfive camera on a tripod. In his home, he also had a large studio camera. He did not take flash shots, even though flashes were used in a limited way early in his career and made it possible for photographers to shoot nearly anywhere by the 1930s. Even earlier, around 1920, halfway through his career, most commercial photographers had switched to roll or sheet film, but Phelps continued to use glass-plate negatives. And he did not put away his tripod later in the decade, when the introduction of small, handheld cameras like the Leica allowed journalists to...