Picture stories
By Birney Imes
At a family gathering last week, someone suggested we take a group picture. It was a momentous occasion; there were a lot of us there; and everyone thought it a good idea. But, the light was fading. Anyone have a camera?
A cousin offered an iPad; others held up their iPhones. There was some discussion among the more tech-savvy of the group which device offered the best resolution (the iPhone). We hurriedly arranged ourselves, and a non-family member fired away with a device about the size of a Pop Tart.
Earlier in the evening, I watched as a nephew snapped pictures of his children with an iPhone to send to his absent wife. He said he had sent her about 30 pictures already. You wonder what becomes of these images. Do they exist in cyberspace in perpetuity, electronic blips stored on a server in Singapore? Do prints ever get made? Or, do they disappear as quickly as they come into being, serving as little more than a visual tweet of a fleeting moment?
Chances are they won’t end up in a box in someone’s closet to be discovered 30 years later.
Such was the case recently with Terry Craig, an old friend from West Point, who on Friday dropped by a couple of prints he’d just come to town to make copies of.
In 1980 Craig had graduated in art from Belhaven College and was working as a photo conservator for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson. One of his duties was to make display copies of the images in the collection for public viewing.
Someone brought in a box of black and white photographs labeled “The 1927 Flood.” Among those prints was a 3 x 5-inch black and white photograph on which someone had written in pencil on the border, “Parchman 1921.” Craig made a copy for his own purposes; it wasn’t something he did often, but he was intrigued with the image.
Friday afternoon I made a futile search for information about the picture on the MDAH website.
Likely, the prisoners were trustees charged with caring for the hounds used to track escapees.
The men and dogs are standing on a walkway of carefully laid bricks in front of an incongruous background, a house with a porch and what looks to be a fenced-in yard overflowing with blooming flowers. Maybe it was the warden’s home. The strand of seven dogs is moored off camera to a stationary object or held by someone.
You wonder what crimes were committed that led to the incarceration of these men. Murder? Petty theft? Were they wrongly accused? What was the relationship between the prisoners and their young overseer, who not only wears a resolute expression, but packs a long-barreled revolver. Of the three prisoners, only one looks at the camera.
While the photograph represents a moment in time, in the hands of a novelist or a historian, it might be the springboard for a book. Who were these men? What were the events that led them to this moment, to be photographed in this place at this time with these dogs? And how did their lives radiate from this point? What became of them? Their offspring?
About the photograph of the little girl and dog, more is known. Craig made the picture of the niece of his former wife in 1987. He is not sure of the spelling of the child’s name or her present whereabouts, Lynn Southward is his best guess. The child was 4.
Craig was babysitting and working in his garden. The child was playing in an old GMC dump truck Craig inherited from his family’s scrap business.
“You know, you always had a 35mm camera around in those days,” the photographer said.
The dog’s name was Little Bit.
“Mary Doss, a black woman, gave me that dog,” Craig said. “She lived four houses away from us in a three-room shack. She would make my bed every day and drank coffee out of a saucer with Mama and Daddy. She really just hung out with Mama. They would go to garage sales together. Sometimes she would help out at the scrapyard. She was a self-appointed member of the family.”
Craig entered the photograph in a contest sponsored by Kodak and won $1,000 for it. Mary moved to the Delta where she spent her final days with family. Little Bit had epilepsy and one day had a seizure and got run over. Craig thinks the child, who would now be in her early 30s, moved back north.
What remains is this tender photograph, this vestige of a time and place where these lives and circumstances intersected, preserved here by the blink of a camera’s shutter.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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