Cruise of the Pintail: A Journal

Preface

preface / xi There are three books so far written and published about Fonville Winans (1911– 1992), the now famous Louisiana photographer: Myron Tassin’s inadequate Nous Sommes Acadiens = We Are Acadians (1976), Ben Forkner’s Cajun: Fonville (1991), and—the best of the three—Cyril E. Vetter’s Fonville Winans’ Louisiana: Politics, People, and Places (1995), with a foreword by James Carville and an afterword by C. C. Lockwood. There is Melisse Campbell’s good but unpublished term paper, “Photo by Fonville.” Campbell, like another accomplished Baton Rouge storyteller, Ruth Laney, published several thorough and well-documented stories of our “daring Valentino,” Fonville. There have been countless magazine and newspaper articles written about Fonville and his work in photography, cooking, bicycling, mushroom hunting, and movie making. So what is the angle this time? Well, it just so happens that little has been done in Fonville’s own words. Fonville began earnestly and remarkably keeping journals—or diaries, as he called them—when he was twelve or thirteen years old. He kept these records well into his young adulthood . What is more, he wrote well. He was literate, sensitive, and even, as we like to say, seems to have written between the lines. And he took, as many now know, marvelous pictures while he was doing it. The two, his words and his photographs, needed uniting. So that is what his son Robert Lewis “Bob” Winans has done here. A few years ago Dotsie Leblanc approached Bob with a copy of a diary given to her by Fonville before his death in 1992. Dotsie was hoping to complete her book on Grand Isle, Louisiana, and a sort of retrospective of the late Louisiana painter George Blattny, aka Geo. Izvolsky, who depicted the windswept island with Fonville. It seems they were gadding about with brush, canvas, paint, camera, and diaries at the same time (1932–1934). Dotsie wanted permission from Bob, as the executor of Fonville’s estate, to print excerpts from the diary. As Bob reviewed the diary again, he could not help but see the direct connection between his own extensive files of his father’s early Louisiana photos and Fonville’s own words about his adventures in French Louisiana. Voilà. Preface xii / preface Bob asked his sister, Meriget Winans Turner, and me for our thoughts and suggestions about a publisher. Bob had recently returned from his own adventures in far-off California, and we had enjoyed a happy reunion in the backwoods of wVernon Parish. We all were retired. I had taught at LSU in Baton Rouge and had several good experiences with editors and associates of the LSU Press. Plus, we were all aware that Fonville’s long and colorful career was closely associated with the capital city of Baton Rouge. We therefore recommended contacting LSU Press. Soon I found myself writing to bridge the parts of the book together and helping with a few other matters. Meriget, her dear brother, and I all adored Fonville. Here was an opportunity to add a new and valuable chapter to his life. It was simple and it was complex. Margaret Lovecraft of LSU Press made it easy, as we suspected she might. It should be mentioned that Fonville didn’t think much of these early photographs from south Louisiana. In fact, Fonville revisited them only reluctantly in the late 1960s. Here is what happened. While standing and balancing on his bicycle in the summer of 1967, Fonville fell over and promptly broke his leg. It was a bad break and essentially crippled him for a year. During that time, there was much less income from his studio and a good bit of time to kill. In the back of his studio on Laurel Street in downtown Baton Rouge were these old, dusty negatives that he had not looked at in decades. When Fonville was first able to hobble around, he pulled them down and made a few studio prints. The curator of the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge encouraged him to have a show of some of these photographs. The show ran February 15–March 22, 1968, and was a success. Fonville wasn’t convinced that all the fuss was warranted, and little else was done until Bob along with Bob’s wife, the late Vivian Winans, saw greater potential for these photographs. Around 1983 they insisted that Fonville increase the exposure of these iconic images so that the public could enjoy them. Bob and Vivian went to work...