File:Bayard Wootten.jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_11 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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A HISTORIAN'S COAST B. light & Air By David Cecelski • Photos courtesy of the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill "ayard Wootten has long been one of my favorite photographers. Born in New Bern in 1875, she ran portrait studios in New Bern and Chapel Hill for nearly half a century. She was both a talented studio photographer and a gifted pictorialist with a fine artist's eye. She went anywhere, anytime, to get a good photograph. Camera in hand, she stayed for days in an Appalachian logging camp, flew in a Wright brothers' airplane and prowled the Croatan swamps. Wootten's life and work are introduced to younger generations in Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten, a splendid new book by Jerry Cotten, the photographic archivist at UNC-Chapel Hill's North Carolina Collection. Cotten's book tells much about North Carolina earlier this century. Light and Air focuses on Wootten's photographs of the Great Depression. They stand out in sharp contrast to the better- known pictures made by the photographers of the Farm Security Adminis- tration (FSA), a New Deal agency charged with documenting rural hardship. Full of pathos and hopelessness, the FSA photographs are the most enduring images of the 1930s. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans, contains probably the best-known photographs
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Photographer Bayard Wootten at work of that ilk: stark images of hollow-eyed Alabama tenant farmers living dreary, poverty-stricken lives. FSA photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange have had the most profound influence on American documentary photography this century. But while their photographs inspired pity, they rarely meant much to Southern- ers. This is not because people in the South failed to recognize the FSA's harsh images of the Depression. Rare was the rural Southern family that did not know poverty and privation in those years. Rather, few Southerners, black or white, agreed with the bleak, one- dimensional view of the human spirit portrayed in the FSA photographs. Wootten saw a different South, though her photographs did not ignore the hardships of the Great Depression. She did not conceal ragged clothes, dilapidated homes or the gauntness of so many of the people she photographed. But my favorite of Wootten's photographs go far beyond social criticism — they depict a hard-pressed people mustering the grace and strength to survive the Great Depression. Look, for instance, at the 1937 photograph of the girl taking a break from picking strawberries (opposite page). She was one of many seasonal Continued COASTWATCH 19

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