Hi! Hello! I am writing this update from my desk at home in rural Kentucky. I am a Reinke Photojournalism Grant Recipient here at Boyd Station, where I am photographing Harrison County this summer for a historical archive. Both of the photo stories you see in this newsletter, one about a couple in their 80s still picking apples and the other about pigs in a closed-down school, are just two of over 40 different topics I have photographed in the last month.
But first, some updates of where you can see my work, on walls and in print. My photograph, The Whistling Wind and Me, is currently on display at PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. Another photograph, Opryland Calling, will be on display at the Alexandria Museum of Art in Alexandria, LA, from June 30th to October 7th. Opryland Calling is also being published in The Photo Review, a foremost fine art photography publication, my photograph being selected by Juror Deborah Willis. You can also pick up a copy of STEM Magazine, where my photograph of a rural taxidermist is published. Finally, I want to thank all of you for purchasing digital and print copies of Dek Unu, a magazine that dedicated an entire month’s issue to my writing and photography. My portion of the proceeds is going to tornado recovery in Amory, Mississippi. You can still purchase a copy here.
ENOUGH of me, time for the two stories! Click view entire message at the end of the email to keep going! (these photos have been optimized for this email, see the full resolution versions on my Instagram.
I was 65 miles per hour around a curve when I saw the man in the tree. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over and started shouting an explanation of what Boyd’s Station does, why I photograph, why I want to photograph him. The man in the tree.
But the voice calling back to me, shouting a litany of confused “what?”’s and “who?”’s, was not coming from the tree. Velma Riickert appeared from down the hill, while her husband, Freddie, continued working among the branches.
“What kind of trees are these?” I asked as I walked closer.
“Have YOU never SEEN an apple tree?” Velma asked, with the intonation of wonder equivalent to meeting an alien.
“I have, just not this close!”
“You buy your fruits and vegetables from the store and don’t wonder where they come from?????” She continued.
You see, I could have checkmated. Never once have I bought a fruit OR a vegetable from the store.
The Riickerts started their farm back in the late 1970’s with a single apple tree. Now, the operation has grown to over 10 apple and pear trees, along with a crop field of rotating fruits and vegetables like cabbage, strawberries, and sweet potatoes. And Velma made sure I knew what every single one of them was, as I walked around the farm for several hours. Finally, she showed me her antique farm tractor collection.
“Guess what year this one is? Guess!” She asked, a glimmer in her eye.
“1974?”
“Nope! 1962, and it looks good as new!” The Riickerts buy the old tractors and refurbish them to make them look as close to original as possible.
12:00. 90 degrees, the sun hung in the sky like a lightbulb in a tanning bed, turning all the neutral asphalt into a hot track of simmering heat wave. That’s when I first saw him. Alright, enough of that silly writing. I saw a man in his driveway, I walked up to him to ask about a crazy building I saw up the road. Pause on the man in the driveway, blue jeans, boots, sweat. It’s summer, okay?
First, the building: two stories, grey concrete (I think) walls turning tan from a century of sun, trophies in the second window. To kill any mystery, an old school, closed when Sunrise’s population could no longer support it, and transportation made consolidation a certainty.
“Yeah, I heard they raise pigs in there now,” the man in the driveway told me, after saying he didn’t like photographers and made one of those “cut it out” motions with his hand by his neck. But he did give me a name: Barnes. Gregg Barnes. I drove back to the old school and wandered around, shouting, “Mr. Barnes? Mr. BARNESSSS?” No one was home. So instead, I scribbled out a note, the standard treatment, Hi my name is Lukas, I have a camera, I take pictures, I write stories, please give me a call, can I see inside the school? My finest handwriting. To answer your question, it looked like you gave 6 packs of skittles to a first grader. Chicken scratch. (If you didn’t laugh at that pun, I will cry)
A couple days later, I finally got the opportunity to go in. I was photographing a man fixing lawnmowers when Gregg called. “Hey, my kid, well he isn’t really a kid anymore, he is 15, is shearing sheep if you want to come photograph.” Did you know the backroads of Harrison County would make for a great racetrack?
Gregg’s mother purchased the school after it closed sometime in the 1950’s, Barnes told me. And since then, it has become a bit of a tourist attraction. “People come from all over to see it, I see them standing outside and taking photos and let people in when they ask. A lot of them went to school here.” He has had visitors in their 90’s, coming back to visit what their elementary school back in the 1920’s looks like in a new century. Visitors have even dug around the building, finding objects buried deep beneath the dirt.
The rooms are still recognizable, molding for chalkboards in the classrooms, large windows in the cafeteria, long narrow space for the boiler room. In one classroom, Barnes has two pigs in a pen, with a portrait made sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century of a woman sitting where a chalkboard would have possibly been. “I think that must have been one of the teachers,” Barnes guessed, his sheep, Sally, wandering the classroom floor. Barnes views the building as history, still living as a storage space and farm work area for his family. “I put in all the work I can to keep this place up, man,” Barnes said. There aren’t many of these left, he lamented, time caught them all. And one day, he says, time will catch this place too. But not yet.
That’s all, folks! See you next Sunday.
Love your work!