Bottle Trees

One of the most arresting sights in a garden or landscape is the bottle tree. All are alike, but no two are the same. Some consist solely of blue bottles; some have great variety in the size, shape and color. It's rare for me to see one, since I don't get out into the countryside too much. But there's no telling where they'll show up - in fact, the one shown here was located in a dense urban neighborhood. The strand of Christmas lights is an unusual embellishment.

The story is that bad spirits are irresistibly drawn into them, become trapped and can't enter the house to do harm. Most people, including some scholars, believe them to be an African survival, first employed by slaves. The great American writer Eudora Welty, while working for the W.P.A. in the 1930s, took the black and white photo in Simpson County, Mississippi. She also wrote about bottle trees in her short story "Livvie."

The boldly painted Clorox bottle in the last picture was done by Mary T. Smith, a well-known African American folk artist from Mississippi. She made several of these spirit traps. It was given to me by a friend during a rough time in my life. I never put it outside.

Hale County Alabama

Hale County Alabama is in the west central part of the state. It is largely rural and has a population of less than 20,000. I claim no special knowledge of the place. In fact, what I know most about it is that it is the setting for three significant bodies of work in American arts.

Walker Evans, working with James Agee and on assignment for Fortune magazine, spent several weeks there in 1936, documenting the life of sharecroppers in the cotton belt. One result was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a seminal photo essay and probably one of the more important books of the 20th century. Evans' images from there continue to represent some of the collective American imagery of poverty and the Depression. The Library of Congress owns a number of these images. The first two photos above are his.

William Christenberry is a photographer, painter and sculptor. I have a particular weakness for his photographs. As a child he spent time in Hale County on his grandparents' farms. Later, as an artist, he used a Brownie camera to take snapshots in Hale County as references for his paintings. After discovering Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1960, he sought out Walker Evans in New York. Evans encouraged him to use the Brownie camera seriously and got him a job at Time-Life. They were friends until Evans' death in 1975. Christenberry has had a long and prolific career as artist and teacher. The third and fourth images are his.

The Rural Studio is a project of Auburn University's school of architecture. It was founded in 1993 by Sam Mockbee and D. K. Ruth, with the aim of teaching students about the social responsibilities of the profession of architecture and building well-constructed and inspiring homes and facilities for the people of western Alabama. They have utilized bales of hay, tires and other recycled materials in their innovative designs. It is based in Newbern, in Hale County, and has many exemplary projects in the area. You can see some of them and learn more here. The fifth image above is an animal shelter they created for Hale County.

The Hale County Road 51 sign, blasted by gunfire, is an artifact we enjoy in our house.

Shake It, Baby

I present this object as a sculpture, but it probably has more meaning as a cultural artifact.

This is a quintessentially American object, a device that "harnessed technology" and promised self-improvement without effort. You pry open the powerful jaws to clamp the contraption around your midsection, turn it on and enjoy a vigorous shaking action. Lose weight and tone muscles without breaking a sweat!

Well, maybe not so much with the weight loss, except in the wallet region.

It's covered with the same stuff as old diner restaurant booths and dinette chairs, attached with upholstery tacks.

The entrepreneurial woman who owned the little cottage industry that made it also produced a device for reducing facial wrinkles by electric shock. Not surprisingly, she was very successful and retired wealthy.

It's a big hit at parties, and when not in use looks great with a spotlight on it .

Mrs. C. C. Beasley, Artist

Dan was a fireman in the county where we grew up. My friend since childhood, he knows something of my interests, and called me after being summoned to put out a small kitchen fire. He gave me directions to a rural house and promised the trip would be worth my time.

That's how I came to meet Mrs. C. C. Beasley, artist. She lived alone in a small wooden house with a tin roof and a dirt yard she swept with a homemade broom.

Quiet and soft-spoken, she was obviously pleased by my interest in the way she had enhanced her environment. It was not yet spring, so nothing was growing, but that she was a gardener was apparent by all the planters on her porch and around the yard. Each planter, whether terracotta, a cast iron washpot, a galvanized metal tub or black plastic containers from the nursery, was individually dotted, dabbed or striped with paint. Colored Christmas lights were strung along the top edge of her porch, and on the floor below them was an arrangement of animal figurines, a doll in a basket and a plastic Santa Claus - what some might call an installation. Even a large quartz rock at the base of her shade oak was done in dots and drips.

When I asked if I could take her picture, she chose to hold an iron tine from an old piece of farm equipment, which she had also decorated with a declaration: "Painted by Mrs. C. C. Beasley Born Apr. 1909." Artist.

3 Fates in 2 Words

One of the most poignant headstones ever written: three names, one date, two words.

Tybee Island, Georgia, near Savannah.

Raw Power

Yesterday's post of the photographer's self-portrait brought to mind one of more evocative images I own. It too is a real photo postcard, and shows a man with a very young child dressed in white on his knee. The expression on his face, which I read as pure shell-shocked grief, just begs the story. I imagine that his wife. the child's mother, has died, and now he faces a frightening future without her, the daunting prospect of being a father alone and poor. Note the patch on his pants at the knee. It's remarkable that he chose to have this portrait made. I think of it as a sort of post-post-mortem. The condition of the card, stained and stepped on, just amplifies the effect. I put it right up there with Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother portrait.

Exposed

Keeping a blog, and reading those of others, is interesting both for what is revealed and what is concealed. I suppose that we're all practicing some form of self-portraiture. Thinking about that today reminded me of a real photo postcard in my collection that has a single scrawled word on it, "Me." I bought it for two reasons: first, for that lonely, concise and assertive inscription, and second, because it's a portrait of the photographer himself, who, for once, has stepped around in front of the camera. Leaning against his leg is a large case, and against it, a film holder with the word Exposed clearly visible.