Featured Photographer Wesley G. Morgan

Abstract

Featured Photographer Wesley G. Morgan Samantha Cole (bio) Wes Morgan is a man of varied interests. He hikes approximately five hundred miles every year in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and enjoys string band and bluegrass music, playing the guitar, banjo and mandolin. Professionally, he is finishing a phased retirement from his position as a full-time professor at the University of Tennessee in the Department of Psychology. Like Cormac McCarthy, he was born up North, in his case in Albany, New York, and moved South as a youngster, to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1944. He first moved to Knoxville in 1962 when he entered graduate school and has lived there with his family since 1970. Morgan's impetus to begin photography came from his father, who was also an amateur photographer. Though not particularly interested in his father's hobby at an early age, Morgan believes that exposure to the activity during his formative years must have influenced him to take up a camera himself. His appreciation of photography came after sifting through some seventeen-thousand images in a collection of Farm Security Administration works paid for by the government during the 1930s and '40s. He felt a connection with the photographers he found there, such as Russell Lee, Walker Evans, and especially Marion Post Wolcott. McCarthy came later. Beginning about 2002, he began photographing the places McCarthy referenced in his early works set in Knoxville and East Tennessee. He felt a real urgency to document these important literary places before they were lost to the wrecking ball and urban redevelopment. Morgan did have a brief encounter with McCarthy once in the lobby of a Chicago theater after McCarthy's play, The Sunset Limited, premiered in 2006. He readily admits to being "starstuck." Morgan has assisted several translators in their work on the novel Suttree and published papers about McCarthy in Puerto del Sol and The Cormac McCarthy Journal. It was there where he first published the route followed by the father and boy in McCarthy's The Road. Wes Morgan also maintains a website, Searching for Suttree, which includes his photos of appropriate sites and an accompanying map. Amazingly, it also includes links to concordances that he, Christopher Forbis, and John Sepich prepared of the words used in all of McCarthy's published novels. [End Page 116] Samantha Cole Samantha Cole is a Berea College senior from Lee County, Kentucky, majoring in Appalachian Studies. Since her freshman year, her primary labor position has been with Appalachian Heritage. She has also served as the editor of Carillon, the Berea College literary magazine. Copyright © 2010 Berea College