The Day Is Past and Gone: Family Photographs from Eastern North Carolina

An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue

Scott L. Matthews

• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780807882498
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: History

Part essay, part memory—this piece finds the perfect form to explore the pictures that might rely most for meaning on the stories that accompany them: family photos. This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures: The Photography Issue."'It is in fact hard to get the camera to tell the truth; yet it can be made to, in many ways and on many levels. Some of the best photographs we are ever likely to see are innocent domestic snapshots.'"

NOT FORGOTTEN
The Day Is Past and Gone

Family Photographs from Eastern North Carolina

BY SCOTT MATTHEWS

“My great-aunt always patiently answered my questions about the people in the pictures and provided stories to accompany them when she could. For instance: the black bear on a chain that keeps showing up?” All photographs courtesy of Scott Matthews.

“It is in fact hard to get the camera to tell the truth; yet it can be made to, in many ways and on many levels. Some of the best photographs we are ever likely to see are innocent domestic snapshots. . . .”

—James Agee (1946)

“One of the most envied accompaniments of high birth in the past is becoming almost universal. Almost everyone nowadays is possessed of family portraits . . . As in the case of jewels, there is something fictitious about the store which is set by them. Nevertheless the fascination of such heirlooms is eternal.”

—The Living Age (1913)¹

The family photographs presented here come from a collection my great-aunt kept at the family home-place in the Rosebud community of Wilson County, North Carolina. Stowed away in shoeboxes marked “The Good Ol’ Days,” these photographs chronicle life in a small corner of the coastal plain from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The pictures portray the cycles and rhythms of rural life and the people who shaped the region’s unique landscape and language, architecture and culture. The families seen in the photographs—Matthews, Taylor, Pender, Varnell, Barnes, Flowers—intermarried and created a community sustained by agriculture, barbecues, hunting, fishing, and visits on the porch.

Family, private, personal, domestic photographs—however you choose to name them, they often seem unremarkable to those unfamiliar with the people and places depicted in the pictures. They do not aspire to art. If they are propaganda, it is of the familial sort. Domestic photographs can seem commonplace and pedestrian unless you care to take an empathetic, imaginative leap into the lives of the people in the images or, especially, if you have a personal connection to them. Then they seem alive and of inestimable value. They are what you would grab first in a fire.

In recent years, I made regular visits to my great-aunt’s house on my way to and from school in central Virginia. She ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• NOT FORGOTTEN The Day Is Past and Gone