George Roesch Johnson

"Appalachia 1969," photographs, 9/4-10/30, Fifth@21 Gallery, 21 N. Park St.

Fifth@21 Gallery: Office of Human Resources, UW-Madison, 21 N Park St., Ste. 5101, Madison, WI 53715

press release/artist statement: How I came to photograph the people in Appalachia is a roundabout story. It started when I was hired by a Milwaukee public relation firm to record sound for a documentary project on poverty in America. Our crew crisscrossed the county from the Bad River reservation in Wisconsin to Harlem in New York. By chance, we had an invitation to visit Marie Cirillo, a grassroots organizer in rural Tennessee, who heard about our project. Our producer decided to take up the offer.  I had never been south of Indiana, but as I left I75 and Knoxville behind to turn on to a narrow twisting road that led into small valleys between fog shrouded green and blue mountain ranges, I was struck by the beauty and isolation of the land.

Marie Cirillo, a Glenmary sister who had been working with the Appalachian diaspora in Chicago, also felt this connection and decided to join the people who stayed in rural Appalachia. What she found was readymade communities. She moved to Roses Creek Hollow in the Clearfork Valley, or Clairfield, Tennessee. There she discovered that decades of control over Appalachia’s resources by companies like a British owned American Association had left the community in poor health with lack of jobs and bad roads frequently flooded due to strip mining. She found that 90 percent of the land was owned by absentee companies and only about a thousand folks remained from a population of over ten thousand. She was determined to build a community and to call attention to the needs of the Clearfork valley and thus our invitation.

Marie helped coordinate our filming sites and as each day passed I realized how much I liked the land, the people and her project. She invited me back to participate as a photographer and organizer working for Federation of Communities in Service (FOCIS), a group she helped organize.  She had faith in me and arranged for a Rockefeller grant to pay me, and others who were once Glenmary sisters, a small salary for the summer. A self-taught photographer with no formal training, my inspiration for what was possible included the Walker Evens photographs in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Inspired I gave up my job, outfitted my ¾ ton van to become a traveling darkroom and took my wife and young son along for the adventure.

Yes, I saw poverty and despair but also hope and grit. I learned how to shoot a pistol from a Hatfield seen in the photograph standing before his axe hued log house with no running water or electricity. I was mesmerized by a church service held on a river bank with folks speaking in tongues. I was touched by the Miller family’s determination to keep their home and the miner with black lung who wore his safety helmet and smiled. And, although outsiders who were greeted with some distrust, we organized potlucks, dances, and art classes in old abandoned buildings or schools. We also sat on porches and played a guitar or banjo with a community that seemed full of music. I taught adolescents how to photograph or film their lives as they recorded simple pleasures of living on a farm, or the stark outlines of their religion contrasted against their moonshine and hell raising.

I did this mostly with a Lecia M2 and 35mm lens, which meant I had to be close and respectful to the people I photographed. My dark room had no running water, got hot and sometimes reticulated the film – as a result I lost negatives. Some of these prints are fifty years old, and I cannot find the negatives, others are digital copies and printed on a Cannon ink jet printer.