In black and white photographs, and writings about the subjects of the pictures, Paul Kwilecki documented life in the small town of Bainbridge in Decatur County, Georgia.
In a review for Garden and Gun, Clyde E. Edgerton called it “one of the best and most important books to come from the South,” adding, “now on my shelf beside Faulkner, Welty, and O’Connor.”[2] Roger Hodge, editor-in-chief of Oxford American Magazine, called One Place “a masterpiece of documentary art.”[3] Isadore Kwilecki, Paul's grandfather, came to the United States from Prussia in 1866.
Settling in Bainbridge, he opened a hardware store handed down in the family until Paul sold it in 1975 to devote himself full-time to photography.
[4] Paul Kwilecki lived in Bainbridge all his life with the exception of four years of college and graduate school at Emory University in Atlanta.
As a teenager, his acquaintance with images on film expanded as he served as photographer for his high school yearbook and worked as a projectionist in Bainbridge's movie theatre.
In college, he and a friend published in Life magazine a picture they made of Kappa Alpha Order fraternity members dressed in Confederate regalia.
The court house series, for example, contains images of a jail cell, a jury room, individuals nervously waiting in hallways, a sheriff, a bathroom, and prisoners eating a Thanksgiving meal.
“The [courthouse building’s] institutional coldness and its clumsy hulking that dwarfs the human figure, strike at the vulnerability of people, producing an atmosphere of estrangement that can be read on the faces of all who go there,” wrote Kwilecki.
The Junior-Senior prom series, depicting a local rite of passage, illustrates the complexity theme, specifically that “negative reactions,” as Kwilecki noted in a talk, “coexist with positive ones.”[13] The pictures show a ceremonial promenade of couples through the park on the afternoon of the dance.
[14] In multiple images, the high school students and their mothers appear anxious, a surprising emotion on a supposedly festive occasion.
The pressure that builds from family and spectators is crushing.” Headed towards the dance, couples pose in their finery before a memorial in the park honoring local young men killed in overseas battles.
[15] Photographs of a night baptism in an African-American church yard convey the incongruence between physical reality and religious meaning.
[16] Two pictures show the pastor, dressed in white, executing the dramatic ritual gestures through which Christians imitate the Savior and move towards God.
“No one noticed,” Kwilecki commented, “that their vessel of salvation was a rectangle of mildewed concrete blocks surrounded by weeds and lit by a single bulb.”[17] The photographs in some series were made over several decades.
Here, we find Kwilecki's fellow sojourners in time, and Decatur County: black and white, young and old, workers and storeowners and shoppers, preachers and prisoners.
The weeds and wildflowers growing there give no indication that it ever existed.”[23] Kwilecki did not present himself as an impartial observer of life in Bainbridge.
He characterized the former deity as “vain, ostentatious, and bombastic,” and the latter as “a no-nonsense father who loves all his children unconditionally.” Although a non-believer himself, Kwilecki used spiritual metaphors to describe the day he photographed Mt.
Horum stand in sharp contrast to his only picture of Bainbridge's First Baptist Church, a large brick structure with columns patronized by respectable white citizens.
Kwilecki shows First Baptist under cloudy sky, upstaged by a parking lot full of bulky cars.
“Always,” he wrote of his photographs, “the essential element was feeling.”[27] He considered the poverty-stricken blacks of the Battles’ Quarters and shade tobacco series to be “people of enormous vitality and durability.” Of the shade tobacco workers, he commented, “There’s a poise and beauty about them.”[28] He also noted their “world-weariness, frustration that race made them consumable and therefore expendable.” Still, with zeal, humor, and stamina, they endured “days of back-breaking work and nights of despair in the subtropical, intensely prejudiced south Georgia atmosphere.”[29] “The message in my work,” he commented in an interview, ”is compassion.”[30] Paul Kwilecki photographs in Duke Digital Repository Guide to the Paul Kwilecki photographs and papers, Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University