Southern literature and music have long defined the cultural landscape of the South. Today, they increasingly share that landscape with photography. Timothy Duffy’s recent books Blue Muse and Hanging Tree Guitars and his new work in progress Sacred Soul is an opportunity to reflect on how the intersection of music and photography defines our region and on Duffy’s contributions to this tradition.
The work of Eudora Welty and Ernest Gaines reflects a love for photography that has influenced their writing. Welty acknowledged that photographs she took laid the foundation for her fiction: “Nothing could have been written in the way of a story without such a background… It provided the raw material.” For Gaines, photographs connect him to his roots of his family and their past. Speaking about photographs that he took near his home in Oscar, Louisiana, he said, “I keep the photographs because most of these places are gone now…. They are things of the past. I do not think anything like that will ever be there again, ever, ever again.” Timothy Duffy’s work occupies an important niche in a world where southern photography also turns to music as its muse.”
Duffy’s photography continues the tradition of folk song collectors who both recorded and photographed southern musicians, Frederick Ramsey Jr.’s pioneering book Been Here and Gone (1960) mixes the voices of the musicians with their photographs in a deeply moving way. More recently, Alan Lomax’s The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax: Words, Photographs, and Music features memorable photographs such as James “Iron Head” Baker, Hobart Smith, Lonnie and Ed Young, Lucious Smith, Sid Hemphill, Fred McDowell, Almeda Riddle, Forest City Joe, Vera Hall, Bessie Jones and inmates at Parchman prison in Mississippi. Lomax’s photography deepen our appreciation of the musicians with whom he worked as a folksong collector. Ramsey, Lomax and Duffy all use photographs as an essential tool that accompanies their recordings of southern music. They inspire folklorists today to use the camera, as well as the tape recorder, to document roots music.
Duffy, a folklorist, a musician, a photographer, and a producer, views photography as an essential part of his work with Southern musicians. His goal is to both bring out the best in the musicians he works with and help protect their legacies. He has photographed them for more than thirty years and views his photographs as the musicians’ “conduit to the audience of posterity.” He understands that photography and music- the visual and the aural- are inherently sympathetic worlds because they resonate with both our eye and our ear. Together, photographs and music harness the power of memory and sense of place in powerful ways. The work together to deepen our understanding of the American South and its musical roots.
Musicians and photographers are like sorcerers who conjure past moments and sounds to enrich the present. Duffy’s photographs capture the emotional power of the musician.
The historic technologies Duffy employs underscore the rich history of the music each artist performs. His photographs transport us into the artists’ emotions and allow us to occupy their worlds. We enter an imaginative space where we can hear the sounds of survival from an ironing board, a one-strand guitar, or an unaccompanied voice as we travel through time. Image of deeply lined hands and faces hover in this timeless realm that might be this day of a century ago.
Duffy the photographer has become one with the timeless community that he documents. The dancer is one with the dance. This is both Duffy’s journey and ours. Both he and we drift beyond our world into a space defined by roots music.
Duffy’s photographs expand on the southern gothic worlds captured in the photography of Clarence John Loughlin in Ghosts along the Mississippi and in the cinemaphotography of Ben Zetlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild and Ethan and Joel Cohen’s Oh Brother, Where art Thou?. Like the flood scene in Oh Brother, Duffy’s photographs define a new relationship with the American South. He reminds us that the porous membrane between the South’s past and its present- in which the past is never dead, not even past is never dead, not even past-is constantly shifting. We are defined by our past, and each generation is forced to relive its glories and its nightmares, but Duffy’s photography allows us a new perspective as both we and the artists float within a liminal space and time.
Timothy Duffy’s embrace of photography and music in his current work is a powerful reminder of how southern place and memory both hold and liberate us. He challenges us to look anew at music and photography with his exploration of Southern musical communities.
Written by Bill Ferris