Customer Reviews

The Picture Man

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Paul Buchanan was an itinerant photographer who, between 1920 and 1951, wandered four North Carolina mountain counties (Mitchell, Avery, Yancy, and McDowell) taking photographs for extra money. By and large, the subjects dressed up for these pictures and posed themselves. After all, they were paying precious dimes and quarters for their portraits and Buchanan was not about to impose upon them his vision of who they were. This book includes about 100 of Buchanan's photographic portraits, printed from negatives (many of them glass plates) saved from oblivion by the editor Ann Hawthorne. Although not taken with the purpose of documenting the people of Appalachia, in retrospect they do just that, perhaps even better than many photographs taken with a conscious documentary objective.

I was given the book years ago by my sister, who lives in Mitchell County, North Carolina. I was recently reminded of it by the Amazon review of a classic work of Appalachian photography, "The Appalachian Photographs of Doris Ulmann." THE PICTURE MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAUL BUCHANAN makes an interesting contrast to the Doris Ulmann book. As the editor Ann Hawthorne writes, Ulmann "painstakingly selected and posed her subjects, often having them dress in old, quaint clothes. Through her they became less individuals than icons, embodying her admiring but romanticized image of Appalachians. * * * Doris Ulmann was a photographer and artist. Paul Buchanan was the Picture Man."

Curious about whether there were any reviews of THE PICTURE MAN, I was mildly dismayed to see that there was only one, and that a dismal one-star assessment. I can understand the previous reviewer's disappointment that the subjects of these photographs were, for the most part, unidentified. But as the book makes clear, that was because such information had been lost over the decades the negatives had been in haphazard storage. Better that these pictures be published without names than that they never be published at all! They are not particularly professional in quality or feel, but they are accomplished in ways that I find difficult to articulate, and they certainly convey a vivid sense of American life in that particular slice of time and space. The cover photograph alone is worth a goodly percentage of the cost of the book.

I can't say that THE PICTURE MAN is essential to any library of Appalachia, photography, or Americana. But it would not be out of place in any such library and paging through it or reading it should be more interesting to most folks than many highfalutin academic monographs or coffee-table books of photographs. It certainly warrants more than one star. 3-1/2 stars is about right.

There are plenty of pictures of the people of North Carolina but there are no names associated with them. I bought this for a relative who was born and raised in this area 50 years ago and she was very frustrated. We bought Mitchell County, Images of America and Spruce Pine, Images of America and she knew a lot of people in it and was very pleased.