This is Dixie

I was winding my way through the backwoods of Mississippi on the fifth day of what I hope will be a three week trip to photograph the rural South. I was thirty or more miles southeast of Meridian and I was getting hungry for lunch, but a town big enough to support a café was some ways off. I passed a small building with an RC Cola machine out front and a hand lettered sign that said “fresh catfish”. I thought it looked promising, so I pulled in.

I walked in the door and realized it wasn’t a café at all, but a small retail food store, albeit an improvised one. There were no windows and the food was laid out on folding tables and makeshift shelves. Oh, well, I thought. I’ll just have to wait to eat.

As I started to back into my car I noticed a young woman sitting on the front porch of the small ranch house next to the store. I waved and she stood up and hurried into the house. I was close enough to see that she had Down syndrome and I guess I had startled her. I didn’t want to make anyone nervous, so I stood by my open car and waited to see if someone would come out. Within moments an older woman stuck her head out of the screen door.

“Can I help you?” she called.

She didn’t seem suspicious, only curious. I explained I was looking for lunch and was sorry to have bothered her.

“There’s a diner in Quitman. And a Hardee’s, I think. They’re about a half hour from here.” She paused, then, “Where’re you from?”

I explained I was from Atlanta and was passing through on a trip through rural areas taking photographs along the way.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve got to see our church. It was built in 1873. It’s one of the oldest in Mississippi. It’s just back that way,” she pointed the way I had come.

I told her I was really doing mostly portraits and would she have a few minutes to come with me to the church to sit for one.

“Oh, no! I haven’t had time to even brush my hair today and I’m in the middle of cooking for a church supper tonight. But I know someone who’d be happy to. Let me call her,” she said as she went back inside. The younger woman peeked out the door for a minute until the older one came back out.

“Sue’d be happy to, but she can’t for twenty minutes. If you want, you can come on in and wait and I’ll feed you lunch.”

“Well, that’d be great,” I said and went up the stairs into the house.

It was cluttered, but seemed clean. She cleared a small space at the kitchen table for me and as I walked over, she held out her hand.

“I’m Pat. This is Dixie. She’s twenty-nine.” I shook Pat’s hand and Dixie offered her’s, as well. I noticed she was wearing a fairly gaudy Christmas sweater.

“Nice sweater, Dixie,” I said. She giggled.

“I have some leftover pulled pork with beef liver chopped up in it I can put over some rice, if that’s OK,” Pat said.

“Sounds good,” I said, hoping it would be tolerable.

She put a large plastic dish in a microwave and turned it on. She bustled around, made me some toast, and continued working in the kitchen. I’m not entirely clear what she was making, but it involved what appeared to be dehydrated potatoes that came out of a large red box. We talked as she worked. She wanted to know about my family and what my wife’s name was. She told me she had buried two husbands, the first from “the cancer” and the second after a tractor had turned over on him. She was on her third now, a preacher and retired maintenance worker. That’s why she was cooking. It’s the wife’s job to do most of the cooking for church dinners apparently.

As we talked, Dixie would come and go from the kitchen. I soon realized she was wearing a different outfit every time she came back, each with a Christmas theme. By the third time, she had reached her pinnacle. Her sweater was decorated with ornaments and little wrapped packages and bows and on her head was “deely bobbers” in the shape of Santa Claus.

At some point, Pat turned the conversation to politics. Dangerous ground, I thought, but let’s see where this goes.

I told her that I thought both candidates had had serious flaws and she agreed with me. Without specifically asking, it was clear she wanted to know who I voted for. I admitted voting for Hillary and she said she had voted for Trump.

“I used to like Bill Clinton,” she said. “That is, until he passed that law saying that anyone pregnant with a Down syndrome baby had to have an abortion. That definitely soured me on him. I mean, my Dixie has been such a blessing, you know?”

“I can imagine,” I said. I considered saying, Wow, I don’t remember that. Or maybe, What? Are you serious? But I thought better of it and just let it go. I was pleased when the phone rang and Pat answered it and said, “I’ll send him right over.”

“Why don’t you take Dixie with you,” she said. “You can drop her back here when you’re done.”

“Well, sure,” I said. We went out to the car and I cleared the front seat of my various supplies and crap to make room for my passenger. I briefly wondered whether Pat often sent her disabled daughter off in cars with total strangers.

Immediately after we pulled into the gravel drive of the church, a large SUV pulled in, too. Sue Pearson got out and introduced herself after getting a big hug from Dixie.

We went inside the beautiful little chapel and Sue told me about its history. After some reorganization in the Methodist Church in the 1940s, most of its parishioners went to other churches leaving this one more or less abandoned. Eventually some local people banded together to preserve the building and now it has services only once a year, but they have an endowment big enough to ensure the upkeep for the foreseeable future. Sue is the secretary of the board that oversees that process.

I shot her portrait sitting in the pews and then, as I started to pack my gear I saw Dixie standing there, so I asked her if she wanted her picture taken, too.

 

Afterwards, I drove Dixie back home and Pat came out to greet us. I got out to thank her again for her generosity, feeding me and setting up my portrait with Sue.

“Well,” she said, “sometimes you meet someone and you just know they’re good people. I felt that way about you.”

Thank you, Pat. You clearly have a big heart and I appreciate that.

To Zoom or Not to Zoom- Portraits with Primes

(A slightly different version of this post originally appeared on the Sigma lens site. You can see it here.)

As a photographer who specializes in environmental portraiture, lens selection is critical to the look of my work. Much of the time I choose to shoot with prime lenses. Let me explain why I made that decision for one of my projects.

In 2014, I was given an artist residency at The Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences in Rabun, Georgia.  For two weeks that year and again in 2015 and 2016, I was given a cabin tucked away in the mountains, dinner prepared for me four nights a week, and encouragement to do whatever I wanted. I had driven through the area around Hambidge a number of times when my wife and I had gone to the Great Smokie Mountains of North Carolina from our home in Atlanta on camping trips. We often stopped at flea markets along the way and the faces I saw at these rural stops struck me. There was an extraordinary range of types and ages and looks. I knew there was a project here waiting for me to photograph. That idea became American Flea.

Mary-Lynn Starkey runs a small flea market near Franklin, NC with her husband Roger. They told me they decided to open their store because they needed some way to get rid of the stuff they had accumulated by going to auction. 

 For me, shooting portraits takes time, primarily because I need to talk to my subjects to get them to relax and trust me. The flea market portraits were no different- in fact, talking to people became an integral part of the process. Many of the vendors and customers will tell you that making money or finding bargains isn’t the thing they enjoy most about the experience. What they really love is the chance to meet and talk to the people they encounter. I found that everyone had a story and they wanted to share it with me.

Charles Brank, AKA Chuck B, sells his woodcarvings at the Franklin Flea and Craft Market in Franklin, NC.

When I work in this way, I think of portraiture as an active process. I’m not a passive observer as when I’m doing a story that requires a more candid approach. I’m actively engaged with my subjects when we’re talking before I start photographing and as the shooting begins, that engagement continues. I set up strobes and I rarely work from a tripod.

Peggy Hines, Randy Hines, and Randy’s mother, Christine Duncan sell odds and ends at the Woodpecker Wood Works Flea Market in Franklin, NC.

Primes, that is non-zoom lenses, were perfect for this style. I don’t want to hang back, zooming in and out to alter my compositions. I want to be actively moving around the space, closer, farther away, higher, lower. I sometimes think of myself dancing when I shoot like this. It’s a metaphoric dance as I try to elicit the best expression or pose from someone, but it almost becomes a literal dance as I change the scene in my viewfinder. The focal lengths of 24mm, 35mm, and 50mm are perfect for showing the environments that are so important to this work. I may even try a 20mm for some of them when I’m in particularly tight spaces and want to see even more if the environment in the frame.

Dodie Allen was helping a friend out by working in his vegetable stand at Uncle Bill’s Flea Market in Whittier, NC.

 All the photographs in this post were taken with a Nikon D600. The lenses were The Sigma Art Series primes specifically 24mm f1.4 DG | Art, 35mm f1.4 DG | Art, and 50mm f1.4 DG | Art Series. All were lit using an Elinchrom ELB with a 17 inch silver beauty dish. Most were shot utilizing Hi-Sync technology which let me synchronize my Nikon at speeds up to 1/4000 of a second. Stay tuned to my blog (or better yet subscribe to it) for an upcoming post that explains Hi-Sync in detail.

You can see more from American Flea on my web site.

The Best Picture I Never Took

First haircut

In 1989, I did a story on a prison boot camp called Monterey Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility. It was in rural New York State, way at the end of a dirt road. There were no bars, no walls or guard towers, and no visible guns. The program was for young non-violent offenders and, if completed, reduced their sentence from three to nine years to just six months.

It was run like a military facility and the guards were called drill instructors. I spent a total of five days there over a two month period and was able to photograph the entire program with groups of different inmates, from arriving in shackles to graduation day with inmates in jacket and ties. The New York Department of Corrections gave me total access. I was there from 5:00AM to 10:00PM and I could shoot anything I wanted and talk to anyone, anytime. That freedom led me to the best picture I never took.

One morning after calisthenics and breakfast I was passing through the dorm area and went near a bathroom. I looked in and there was a line of toilets, most occupied. No walls between them, no stalls, no privacy whatsoever. Other people, guards and inmates were walking through, so I did too. There was beautiful soft morning light coming in windows opposite and the line of white porcelain, shiny pipes up the wall, gray cinderblock, and a range of skin tones made for an extraordinary image.

I actually brought one of my Nikons with a wide angle lens up to my eye and looked for a moment before lowering it. It was a great picture, no doubt about it. But it seemed unfair to take it. Is there any time when we feel more vulnerable and defenseless than when we’re sitting on the toilet? I don’t think so. I couldn’t bring myself to take advantage of those young men’s vulnerability, no matter how good a picture it was.

I don’t regret not taking that photograph. But I often think about “the one that got away.”

The following are a few of the pictures from that story.

Waiting in line

Dawn reveille

Running to dawn physical training

 

 

 

 

48 men shower in 3 minutes

Superintendent Ron Mosicki

Morning PT

Parole hearing

Graduation day

Manfrotto Articles

I've recently been writing some articles for my friends at Manfrotto. They give some additional background on projects I've been working on lately. If you have time, head on over and take a look.

http://www.manfrottobags.com/author/forest-mcmullin/?display=stories#4428

Ken Iron Horse is Apache and Algonquin Indian. He's an artist and makes crafts inspired by his heritage which he sells alongside his paintings at the Blue Ridge Flea Market in Blue Ridge, GA.

 

Why social media matters and excerpts from an article about Day & Night

If you've been following this blog or watching my other social media outlets, you know that I've been getting a lot of press lately. I thought it might be useful to understand why that's happening.

Back in January, I was invited to join a web site called Lens Culture. I was only slightly aware of them, but after going to the site and realizing it wouldn't cost me anything, I joined and posted a couple of my projects there.

In June, I was lucky enough to spend two weeks at an artist residency in the north Georgia mountains. I wrote about it here. When I returned I posted a number of pictures from a new project called American Flea on my Lens Culture page. Then on August 6, Lens Culture posted American Flea in the Spotlight position on their home page as one of their Editors Picks.

Within a few days, apparently after seeing my work on Lens Culture, a number of widely read blogs ran pieces about another project of mine, Day & Night. These included Beautiful Decay, Dark Silence in Suburbia, Design Taxi, and USvsTH3M. These stories were re-posted dozens, possibly hundreds of time, all over the world, in a variety of languages.

Then came the two big ones. About August 22, Distractify and Huffington Post each ran stories. Distractify's was about American Flea and Huff Post's was about Day & Night. These sites get millions of hits a month. I immediately saw the hits on both my blog and my Lens Culture profile page skyrocket. This in turn has generated a number of inquiries from web publications asking permission to run various projects of mine.

The big question is (or should be), that's nice, but is there any income involved in all this? Well, I've just signed with a picture agency in the UK to syndicate Day & Night worldwide. They're confident that there will be print sales to magazines internationally. So that's a good thing.

Most of the pictures in Day & Night were taken in 2009 and 2010. I've had them exhibited in a number of shows in Atlanta, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. Now I'm hoping, after all this publicity, some curators will take notice. I'd like to show this work again.

Another nice result was the posting this week of Day & Night on the web site, Feature Shoot. Their writer, Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein did an e-mail interview with me and I'm especially pleased with her insightful comments at the beginning. Below is an excerpt, posted with her permission.

"For Day and Night, Atlanta-based photographer Forest McMullin explores sexual desire and its relationship to human identity, photographing individuals and couples once throughout their daytime routine and again in the privacy of their own bedrooms. On the left, we find a standard vision of middle-class American men and women, enjoying the conventional activities of daily life; in the righthand frame, we discover the same subjects adopting nighttime fantasy roles, morphing into dominatrixes, bondage players, cross-dressers, swingers, and furries.

"In arresting diptychs, we are presented with two sides of the same human coin, the easily accessible public self set against the vulnerable sexual self. In these stolen moments of intimacy, in which the protagonists radiate a palpable sense of confidence, the gap between what we consider to be ordinary and atypical is diminished, reduced to the space as narrow the thin white border that separates the images. Here, we are asked to abandon judgements for a deeper understanding of human erotic diversity. McMullin’s sitters are remarkable for their perceived eccentricity, but they ultimately become surrogates for us all, boldly bringing to light private yearnings that most keep in darkness."

I have no idea how long this will last. But it sure is fun for now.

Doing what's right vs doing what is your right

My project, Day & Night has suddenly been receiving a lot of attention. It's a little weird for a project I shot most of four years ago, but I'm not complaining. It started when the site, Lens Culture featured my project, American Flea, in the spotlight position on their home page. This drove people to my profile page where they found several of my projects, including Day & Night. Within days, excerpts from Day & Night appeared in dozens of widely viewed web sites and blogs like Beautiful Decay, Dark Silence in Suburbia, Design Taxi, and sites around the world in countries like France, Portugal, Greece, England, Spain, Russia, and South Africa.

After Huffington Post did a story on it last week, I got an urgent email from one of the people in the photographs. This person told me that they had radically changed their life since I had shot their portrait, they had found Jesus, and they were terrified that if the wrong eyes saw the picture they would lose their job and it would ruin their life. They asked if I could please get their portrait taken off the Huff Post site.

What was I to do? Whenever I shoot people for Day & Night, they must sign a model release before I take out the camera. Besides signing the release, I emphasize that my intention is for mainstream publication, not some shady little web site that hardly anyone will see. I could not have been clearer. I wanted everyone who participated to be completely comfortable with the process and results. They were, after all, opening up the most intimate details of their lives to me and to public scrutiny. And I'm grateful to them for the trust they show me. I want the pictures to be honest and direct, but respectful. I believe they are.

So- I have every right, legal and otherwise, to include this person's picture when the project is reproduced.

But. . .

What is my human responsibility? How can I, in good conscience allow the possibility of my photograph having a major negative impact on someone's life? How can I say, I'm sorry, but you're not allowed to change your mind, especially if it inconveniences me? And, would Huffington Post even care if I asked them to remove the picture in question?

As it turns out, Huff Post was willing to remove the picture. (Thank you, Katherine Brooks.) And I removed the picture from the Day & Night section of my Lens Culture profile that Huff Post linked to. I told the concerned individual that I would not include their picture in submissions to any mainstream web sites or publications based in the US in the future. I would not include their picture in any exhibitions in their home city. I also made it clear that the picture is already available in many many web sites and blogs around the world and I have no control over who sees them or re-blogs them. This person needs to be prepared and there's really nothing I can do about it at this point.

I suppose this is a bit of a compromise. I haven't promised to do everything in my power to remove all traces of this person's photograph from Day & Night and its circulation. But I'll try to keep it out of places where it could conceivably do damage. And I'll sleep well tonight.

Thoughts?

Stags, Hens, and Bunnies- A Blackpool Story

A year ago, I spent three weeks traveling through England, Scotland, and Wales. I spent a Saturday night in Nottingham and was amazed at what I was told is a very common ritual. "Hen-dos" and "Stag-dos" take the experience of the pre-wedding party to an extreme that American brides and grooms would be surprised by. Besides the requisite heavy drinking and generally outrageous behavior, Brits like to dress in themes, carry sex dolls and sex toys, and make very public spectacles of themselves.

London based photographer Dougie Wallace has spent what I assume is considerable time documenting this tradition. His pictures are raw, vivid, and occasionally a little obscene. And really, really good.

They've been published as a book, available from the UK here. It should be avaialbe here in the States in a couple of months. Here's an excerpt from what's written on the web site:

"Blackpool,  a Northern English town once the granddaddy of the seaside resorts.  Enjoying renewed popularity as one of the UK’s major hen/stag destinations.

Blackpool… A dirty great whorl of debauchery, licentiousness, laughter, vomit, furry handcuffs, fancy dress and drunken oblivion. Turned every weekend into the heart of social darkness. Marauding packs of brides and grooms, close friends and family, on a mission to consume dangerous, liver-crushing levels of alcohol. This, their rite of passage acted out on the last night of freedom, before the conventions and responsibilities of marital life, mortgage, children.

Once a fun diversion from the industrial heartlands – a bit like Las Vegas with a Victorian twist – is a town that has a palpable and genuine energy of its own. The promenade offers up its gala of grotesque and carny seediness; a whole Golden Mile of pubs and bars for swollen bodies to crawl through flashing scary, carrot coloured midriff flesh. The unbridled hedonism is magnified by an inter-pack competitiveness that manifests itself in drinking games, fights or sex in the toilets! Its twisted and ghoulish, and it’s hard not to laugh."

 

Take a few minutes and check them out here.