Faulkner's World The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (review)

Abstract

Faulkner's World The Photographs of Martin J. Dain Edited by Tom Rankin University of Mississippi Press, 1997 112 pp. Cloth, $40.00 Faulkner's World is a book to admire. It begins with a nostalgic foreward by novelist Larry Brown, a genre piece about the changing appearance of Oxford, Mississippi, and Lafayette County. Tom Rankin follows with Evoking William Faulkner, an account of Martin Dain's fascination with Faulkner's writings and how Dain, in the course of his career as a photographer, came to Mississippi to record the world Faulkner knew, to evoke the writer through more than two hundred black-and-white photographs accompanied by occasional text from Faulkner's writing. Despite the book's merits, this combination of images and quotations is unsatisfying. Some thirty years later, the place having changed as Brown eloquently reminds us, the photographs do not evoke so much as document the local world that Faulkner saw and recreated in his imagination. Furthermore, the pictures seem to be about Dain as much as Faulkner -- what Dain selected, how he shot it, how he printed it. Dain photographed residents and business people, the courthouse square, children at school, scenes of rural life, church, and jail, as well as activities such as sorghum-making and deer hunting. Although Faulkner limited Dain's access to him, the photographer still managed to take those memorable pictures of the author wearing his tattered jacket, entering or closing the small door of his barn, hand-hewn timbers rising above and evidencing an enduring past. Dain's camera is respectful not only of the writer, but of almost everyone else. He stands close enough to picture people going about their work, does not intrude on their private moments, records his subjects with dignity and fairness. His images of blacks, of which there are many, reveal Dain's sympathy for their struggles. In one photograph, a woman in sneakers and a thin dress draws a pail of water from a well, an American flag draped on a fence behind her. Certainly the image comments on America, but it also allows the woman to be herself. The picture does not place her in a manipulated context, and she does not exist in the picture to serve an idea. In short, the photographer does not appropriate her. Mrs. Bond, a smiling black woman, watches her children in front of the remains of an antebellum house (the now-demolished Jones-Miller home). They appear comfortable with Dain's presence and perhaps even enjoy his being there. …