Paul Kwilecki: The Only Home He Ever Knew

Photographer Paul Kwilecki spent four decades documenting a single southwest Georgia county, a place he called home and where he never truly fit in. Writer Wendell Brock traces Kwilecki’s steps, combs through his archives and cracks open his personal journals revealing the man’s inner life​ - and genius. 

Words by Wendell Brock | Photos by Paul Kwilecki

June 26, 2024
—
Photos courtesy of the Paul Kwilecki Collection, Archive of Documentary Arts, Duke University

Paul Kwilecki, the great Southern documentary photographer, was so enamored of his hometown that he could get homesick without even leaving. 

He spent a remarkable four decades taking pictures of Bainbridge, Georgia, and surrounding Decatur County – and virtually no place else.

“The picture of the stores on Broad Street that I took Sunday is so lyrical and melancholy and has such a quality of loneliness that it has set me to thinking and feeling further in this direction,” Kwilecki wrote in his private journal in 1967, just seven years into his singular body of work. 

“In that picture I put my finger on a feeling that is distinctly little-town. The stillness of the buildings with not a person in sight gives the viewer the feeling that he is standing alone just across the street about to cry with homesickness, in spite of this all being familiar and his hometown, for it is a more remote, unapproachable home that he longs for. This is as poetic an image as I ever made and I want to pursue the quality that makes it so.” 

Exactly what was  the “remote, unapproachable home” this isolated artist so desperately yearned for? Was it a metaphor for heaven?
A memory of a lost moment in time?

By all accounts a sensitive boy, Kwilecki (pronounced “Kuh-LESS-ski”) picked up a camera when he was 8 and eventually intuited that it could serve a deeper need. Whether sitting in a movie theater or pulling prints in a darkroom, he liked to be alone. He had a desire to tell stories, perhaps be a writer. But with photography — and his eye for the beautiful and the poignant — he could express feelings that might be impossible to put into words. The process was a way of looking inside his heart, and out onto the world, in an instant. 

Southwest Georgia was both a muse and a yoke for Kwilecki: From birth to death, it held him tight. By wandering this largely agricultural, 623-square-mile patch of the subtropics that hugs Florida to the south and extends its southwestern toe almost to Alabama, he could mine the totality of the human experience from a single patch of dirt.

Portrait of Paul Kwilecki. Photo by Jimmy Nicholson

Over time, Kwilecki’s great themes would emerge: home, memory, the passage of time, the certainty of death. And by the time of his own death in 2009, at age 81, he had metamorphosed from a somber young man into a sweet, wistful grandpa with a white beard and a yellow Labrador retriever he fed cubes of cheese and talked to like a baby. By then, Charlotte, his beloved wife of 56 years, was gone, and his work was done: He’d shot thousands of images and culled them down to the 539 master prints that form the core of the Paul Kwilecki Photographs and Papers Collection in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Consisting of more than 9,000 items in 56 boxes and one large folder — 42 linear feet — the archive is a trove of negatives, prints, contact sheets, journals, letters, speeches, and arcana that reveal the soul of the self-taught artist from Bainbridge.

Today, photo geeks the world over consider Paul Kwilecki a master of the documentary form. I’ve never met a serious photographer or curator who didn’t want to pull up a chair and rhapsodize about Kwilecki. Never. You can see his influence on Athens-based Mark Steinmetz, Bainbridge native Jimmy Nicholson, North Carolina’s Rob Amberg, Kentucky’s Sarah Hoskins.

And yet to the general public, Kwilecki’s iconic images of the Decatur County Courthouse, Willis Park, Oak City Cemetery, the Flint River, and numerous other scenes barely register. Kwilecki got this. He did not feel seen — and felt required to explain himself at every turn, from the first picture to the last.

“This is not the kind of project for just anyone,” he wrote in his final book, the posthumously published One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs From Decatur County, Georgia (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). “Decatur County is not exciting or glamorous, and any photographs you derive from it are not likely to make you rich and famous. The desire and energy to continue year after year come from seeing layer on layer of subject matter peeled back before your eyes, material you didn’t know existed until you penetrated the layer above. Eventually, you realize the supply is inexhaustible, a lesson in itself, and that how much of it you can exploit depends on your patience and skill.”  

As it happens, I was born in Decatur County in 1960, the year Kwilecki formalized his approach to documenting this far southwestern corner of Georgia, and I have long been puzzled by the art establishment’s impulse to shoehorn him as a hyper-regionalist. Often have I wondered why his flame hasn’t shone a little brighter. Over two weeks in November, I traveled to Duke, then down to Bainbridge, to search for clues.

In December of 1968, a letter arrived in Kwilecki’s mailbox from Plains. Jimmy Carter, having lost his first Georgia gubernatorial campaign and eyeing his second, needed a photographer. A mutual friend had told the politician that Kwilecki might be willing to help.

Kwilecki wasted no time schooling the Baptist peanut farmer from up the road: “Traditional pictures of politicians — the wife and family all gathered cozily and self-consciously together in their pine-paneled den trying to look unaware that a photographer is taking their picture — are not my bag.” Nonetheless, he was willing to give it a shot — provided he could travel to Plains with a “small box of prints” to show Carter his style and perhaps take a few preliminary shots. 

Kwilecki would go on to finish the as-signment, but that introductory exchange between a then-unknown photographer and a future White House occupant is classic Kwilecki — insecure, anxious, wary, potentially self-sabotaging. It would become a familiar pattern, this reputation for being difficult, for being irascible.   

The truth is, Kwilecki was never anybody’s homeboy.

“I always felt that I was a little bit different from a lot of people I knew,” he told interviewer William Boling in Paul Kwilecki: Photographer, a short documentary by Boling; his son, Alexis; and Faisal Azam, first shown about a year ago as part of Bainbridge’s bicentennial. “And I didn’t know exactly why or how. But I reacted to things differently, and sometimes my emotions were more intense.”   

Kwilecki’s Jewish grandfather, Isadore, immigrated to America from Prussia in the 1860s, when he was 16, eventually settling in Bainbridge and opening a hardware store. Kwilecki’s father was elected mayor in 1938 and ran a bank, in addition to the hardware business. Paul and his older brother, Gerard, grew up on oak-draped East Broughton Street in an elegant two-story, red-brick Federal home with graceful arched windows.

Thinking he might want to be a writer, Kwilecki earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at Emory University, while his brother, athletic and popular, studied at Georgia Tech and Yale and became a successful architect in Bainbridge. 

“Paul was the reticent one — more of a loner, not part of any set circle,” Duke professor Tom Rankin writes in One Place, the eloquent and deeply insightful book he encouraged Kwilecki to make and ultimately edited.

Pilgrim Rest A.M.E. Church, 1980

Kwilecki might have settled comfortably into Bainbridge’s bird-hunting, golf-playing cocktail set, but he never felt that he fit in. He was sensitive, serious, bookish — a mama’s boy.

“His mother absolutely worshiped the ground he walked on,” Kwilecki’s youngest child, Elizabeth Kwilecki Whaley, 61, tells me when we meet in Bainbridge. On the other hand, the father-son relationship could be strained. “I think Daddy thought Pop didn’t understand him, and Daddy didn’t understand Pop,” Whaley says. 

Apparently, the tension began early on. One story Kwilecki told and mentions in his journal occurred during his first days of first grade. He ran away twice, the second time making up a lie so his teacher would excuse him.

I ran home and slipped quietly in the house, upstairs, and hid behind the French provincial bed in the guestroom. Mother was exasperated that this had happened a second time and she called my father who came home from the store and found me hiding behind the bed and drug me out and whipped me. 

“It seemed obvious that my grandfather had done the only thing that could have been done,” Susan Kwilecki, now 69, said of the incident. “Daddy just needed to put his big-boy pants on, as they say today, but he didn’t, and he was deeply wounded by that, I think.” 

Trailways bus station, 1978

In another notebook memory, Kwilecki recalls lying in bed as a young man, upstairs windows open so he could eavesdrop on the action down below.  

Most often they came from town going toward the little houses out Broughton Street, people coming home from the last show at the Ritz, or a worker just getting off from a late job. I’d lie in my bed and listen as they approached and as they faded into the distance. Once or twice I got up and looked out my window. I saw them, their shadow long and thin heading for the street light, the shadow growing shorter as they approached it, disappearing as they were under it, then getting longer until it disappeared again as they walked out of its circle of light.

Already, he was observing the scene with a bit of a film-noir detachment, a touch of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” and a keen sense of the way light creates drama.

Filed away at Duke are the private notebooks Kwilecki kept during the feverish 1967-1969 period when he was trying to teach himself to be a photographer. By then, Kwilecki was married, with four children (Paul, Susan, Frances and Elizabeth), living on Lake Douglas Drive in a modern house designed by his brother, and managing the hardware store. He detested the job but didn’t know how to cut the cord.

His neat, single-spaced journals, presumably typed up at the end of the day while he was still at the store, reveal a fascinating, deeply analytical and sometimes turbulent inner life, imbued with tender memories of days gone by, and trepidation about the future. Opening the cover of the first of eight volumes, I read the title and can’t help but feel a voyeuristic tingle: 

THE PRIVATE NOTEBOOKS OF PAUL KWILECKI
~
Please Keep Out

In the diaries, multiple narratives play out simultaneously: Such is the normal functioning of the human psyche, but Kwilecki’s existential confessions are particularly revealing. Family, work, and his quest for meaning are knotted tightly and impossibly together. Dressed in his trademark jeans, button-down shirt, and owlish glasses, he may have been helping customers find nails and pipe fittings, but his mind was spinning like a cylinder. What astonishes is that he felt compelled to write it all down. In one passage, he worries about the costs, financial and emotional, of selling the business that had been in the family for three generations:

Even if I had a hard time financially, once the break was made, an austere life would not bother me too much personally. But it would break my heart to see Charlotte or the children want things that I couldn’t give them, especially if they were things I could have given them before. As long as I have enough food to eat and enough money to buy film and supplies to photograph, I can get by.

But getting by is not enough for one’s family. Children are entitled to a childhood complete with foolishness and whimsey. I would despise myself if I took it away from them. If this makes me less an artist, then a lesser artist I’ll have to be. People before pictures.

Her father hated running the store, Susan Kwilecki told me. “And when he finally sold it, I was really, really happy because … he was finding his place in the world, and it had never been in business. It had always been to do something [with] his inner world. He had some things there between his ears, or with his heart, that he wanted to do.”

Kwilecki’s daily portrait of a small town — replete with gossip, judgment and petty provocations — is rich, especially for a reader like me, who grew up in Decatur County and knows the milieu. The social demands of Bainbridge took their toll, though. Kwilecki dreaded the cocktail parties, the banal chitchat, a pattern that repeated itself when museums and galleries began showing his work and insisted he be present.

“He was profoundly introverted,” Susan Kwilecki told me, and her mother was an extrovert. “The whole time they were married, they were constantly going at this social issue. Whether they would go out, whether they would go to the Christmas dance, whether they would do this, that or the other, because she wanted to go, she wanted to dance. And he didn’t.”

Charlotte Williford, a piano teacher, was the daughter of a pharmacist from nearby Camilla. She married Paul on June 13, 1952, in two services: one Jewish, one Christian. In the wedding-party photo, Kwilecki wears a formal white coat and black tie; there’s the barest whisper of a smile at the edge of his lips. Charlotte, in an elaborate, multilayered gown, looks like a princess. 

“Mama was scared to death she was going to have to speak Hebrew,” Frances Kwilecki said. Apparently, the groom had been teasing his bride. 

Charlotte, everyone told me, was a paragon of charm and playfulness, a convivial conversationalist who lived to entertain. Every day at 5 p.m., the Kwileckis stopped to enjoy a cocktail — Charlotte called it “drinkiepoo.”  Paul would have a scotch, she a Chardonnay.

“She was delightful,” said Boling, who interviewed Kwilecki in the documentary. “She was smart, and very Southern. Very steel magnolia, I would say. But I never saw the steel, only the magnolia.”

Marriage, ordinary’s office, 1981

If the Kwilecki family dynamic burned at slow simmer, outside was a powder keg.  Kwilecki was deeply troubled by the brutality exploding in the larger world: the bombings and demonstrations, the assassinations. A man on the verge, he sensed the nation was, too.

Martin Luther King was assassinated last night about 7:30 in Memphis, Tennessee, he writes in his journal on April 5, 1968. It is an act too terrible for description. Two months later, as the nation waited 26 hours to hear the fate of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, Kwilecki writes with apocalyptic dread, and a nod to Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:   

I don’t think I ever had a feeling like what I felt this morning. I thought surely there must be something the president can do or the congress or somebody. But nobody did anything, not since JFK and Dallas, and so nobody can stop it apparently, and if nobody stops it what happens? We plunge headlong to anarchy, revolution and dissolution.

“He was definitely more politically progressive than the white people around him,” said Rankin, who directed Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies for 15 years and is now director of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts and professor of the Practice of Art in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. Kwilecki wasn’t out marching, Rankin noted, “but he was really upset at what was happening.” 

Kwilecki took respite in his intellect, and his memories. Those journal entries recounting key childhood interludes shine with the flair of a novelist.  Some of these occurrences — like his job operating the movie projector at Bainbridge’s old Ritz theater  — brought him joy. Others – like a long train ride home from summer camp, desperate to be reunited with his mother  — did not.

He was culturally voracious, devouring photography books, literature, films, philosophy, classical music — critiquing it all in his journals. He soaks up Eugène Atget, Edward Weston, Walker Evans. He expresses adoration for Charles Dickens, tearing up when he reads A Christmas Carol to Susan because it reminds him “with painful vividness” of his mother’s reading it to him on Broughton Street. He recounts an argument with a lawyer friend about Shakespeare. (“He loved the Bard,” Frances told me.) He rereads Huck Finn (“Hemingway was right. Clemens was one of the great American novelists”). He consumes Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in white heat on a single afternoon (“I don’t think she  was awfully talented”) and Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (hated it).  

While Kwilecki’s robust inner life surely stimulated him, and informed his vision, it also reinforced his sense of isolation. He had no one to talk to about photography. Not in Bainbridge. But in his letter writing, he found an outlet. 

He struck up life-changing correspondences with photographer David Vestal,  Gudmund Vigtel (director of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art), and John Szarkowski (director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). In 1963 and 1966, he asked Ansel Adams for technical advice. Adams replied with specifics on mixing developing fluids — and encouraging words. “I am happy to note that you are approaching your environment on a personal, independent and creative basis. … So much photography today is false because it echoes mannerisms and cultisms. We desperately need a fresh and highly personal viewpoint — but a viewpoint always controlled by passion.”

I met Frances Kwilecki when I was 16 and got my first bona-fide job. We punched the clock at the TG&Y discount department store at the Bainbridge Mall. That same year — 1976 — her father made a fine photo of an elderly couple enjoying an ice cream on a bench outside the mall, a runaway shopping cart teetering in the background. I was awkward and unsure of myself, not the sort of kid who looked comfortable pushing a hand truck piled high with cardboard boxes. I took the job at my mother’s insistence, to put gas in the old Pontiac she gave me. Frances, two years ahead of me at Bainbridge High School, was a cashier who worked in health and beauty, next to the record department. She was cool. She seemed liberated, to borrow a phrase from the day. She turned me on to Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne (we both thought he was cute, though we didn’t speak about it, not yet). I can still see her lip-synching Kansas’ “Carry On Wayward Son” as she stocked the shelves with lipstick and fingernail polish. 

And she talked about her daddy a lot.

He’d just sold the hardware store to devote his time to photography. He was on the cusp. And sure enough, by 1979, he’d won a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grant, which paid for him to build a darkroom on Troupe Street. Then, in 1981, Kwilecki scored something of an arts triple crown: He published his first book, Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia (UNC Press), had a one-man show at the High (which I attended with my college roommate and his parents), and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

“I can see him walking around town, through Willis Park, that camera slung over his shoulder, and he’d stop and take a picture of something and keep going. You’d see him everywhere,” said Roslyn Wolffe Palmer, 71, a longtime Bainbridge City Council member who grew up attending Temple Beth-El, which the Kwilecki family had supported since its founding in 1902. 

“He didn’t make a big production. ‘I’m taking this picture to do a book, or documenting history.’ People didn’t realize what he was doing and really didn’t care. And when he got the recognition with the Guggenheim, that was just way, way out of the realm of most of Bainbridge. And Paul wasn’t the kind of person who was going to say, ‘Look at me.’ He  just wasn’t going to do that.”

Palmer’s memories track with mine.

Broad Street, 1980

I vaguely recall going down to Kwilecki’s hardware with my daddy, a peanut farmer, when I was a young boy. My memory of Kwilecki is that he had laser focus.  Not a baby kisser or a natural salesman. As a teen, I’d see him shooting the telephone booths across from the  Kentucky Fried Chicken on the main drag, Shotwell Street. Or the Swine Time Festival in nearby Climax, where my mother’s family lived. I was too intimidated to strike up a conversation with the man, though I was sufficiently influenced by his work to study photography as a University of Georgia  journalism major.

Imagine my surprise when I call up Duke’s Kwilecki archive on the internet to find a college-era photo of me at Swine Time: I’m standing in a group of people watching what I believe is a hog-calling contest, a 35 mm Pentax hanging over my neck. If it weren’t for the camera, I wouldn’t recognize myself.  Or when I open a box of photos at Duke to see my Aunt Irma and cousin Evan worshiping at Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church in Vada, right up the road from where I grew up and where my brother still lives. Or when I spot a comical photo of my Aunt Stella gabbing with friends in the pork department at a Bainbridge grocery store.

I reconnect with Frances the week after Thanksgiving. She tells me I can find her in front of the Winn-Dixie on Shotwell, where she’ll be ringing the Salvation Army bell. What do you say to an old friend you haven’t seen in 40 years? How will it go?

Except for the fact that she tells me everything is “off the record,” it goes wonderfully, thank you, especially when we have a glass of white wine and I meet her rescue pup, Milo. When I tell her how her daddy is venerated by photography lovers I’ve met, she squeals: “MY DADDY? They say that about MY DADDY?”

This sense of modesty may be a family trait. Frances, now 65, is gracious, though perhaps slightly embarrassed, when I tell her I haven’t stopped looking at  her daddy’s photos all these years. And what her friendship meant to a squeaky-voiced teen who was pushed into a job at TG&Y and knew — even then, or rather, especially then — that he wanted to make a life outside Decatur County.

The Kwilecki archives at Duke are crammed with correspondences that show Kwilecki’s epistolary stamina. In letters, he could be charming, earnest, self-deprecating, persistent, nagging — and downright angry. Kwilecki was hungry for feedback, and the responses he received were at worst gently critical and at best terrific. His back-and-forths with David Vestal and John Szarkowski are a display of erudite minds having meaningful conversations about photography. They deserve wider readership. 

In 1966, Kwilecki sent a box of images to MOMA’s Szarkowski, then one of the most influential gatekeepers in American photography. This time, he hit pay dirt. 

Dear Mr. Kwilecki:

I am very pleased that you have sent us your prints. They are real photographs — personally and clearly seen, and executed with directness and sensibility. For me the pictures of people are stronger than the landscapes — perhaps because it is harder to be completely faithful to our theories when confronted by the unarguable authority of another human being. I think the most moving of all to me is the portrait of the young man standing in the white room, with the clock on the wall and the hand-painted fire screen in the corner. If you will sell us a print of this picture for twenty-five dollars (which is our more-or-less standard price for current work), I would be happy to have it in our collection.

In a fairy tale twist, Kwilecki had sold his first photo — a slightly creepy image of a “renter” standing by a door in the home of Bainbridge resident Gus Poulas. To the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, no less.

Outside courtroom, 1982

In 1968, Kwilecki sent Szarkowski more prints. After not hearing back in what he considered a reasonable amount of time, he fired off an ultimatum:

Dear Mr. Szarkowski:

Until now I thought it was harder to get pictures into a museum than out of one. I wrote two weeks ago asking that the prints I sent three months ago be returned, because I have an exhibit coming up and must mount some of them by a date that is fast coming up on me. So far I haven’t received the prints.

I will appreciate your having them returned to me as soon as possible. Again thank you.

The prints made it back to Bainbridge in time for the show to go on — in Jacksonville, Florida. 

Kwilecki  managed to patch up the issue with Szarkowski. But this pattern of impatience with collaborators did not serve him well over time — in either the gallery or publishing spheres. Understandably, he was dismayed by the poor sales of  Understandings and the commission he was being charged by galleries. In June 1983, he wrote to Fay Gold, his Atlanta gallery director, asking for a raise. “If you think you are on the short end of the stick, you should see what it looks like from here,” he bristled. “I will gross something like $3500 this year from photography, if I’m lucky. And that includes royalties from Understandings.”

The following year, he told Gold to return all his prints and said he was removing his work from the market. 

In 1992, Kwilecki self-published his second book, Lowly Wise: Book One: Scenes of Religion in and Around Decatur County, Georgia. He took many of the photos while his daughter Susan, who was a professor of religious studies at Radford University in Virginia, did academic fieldwork at churches in Decatur and Mitchell counties. Kwilecki hoped the book might be a hit at Bainbridge gift shops, and planned it as the first in a series. It sold so poorly he later gave up the idea.

Photos of Black baptisms? No one got it, though my niece, knowing her uncle well, gave me a copy of Lowly Wise when it came out.

An art professor I admired once said his male students were all little Freudians, fixated on “mother, sex, and death.” Though Kwilecki was an admirer of the human figure, no one would ever label him an erotic picture taker. But substitute “love” for “sex,” and you’ve pretty much nailed the man. 

Mama, love, death: It all collides at Oak City Cemetery, the historic graveyard by the Flint River, just a few blocks from downtown Bainbridge. Kwilecki visited the graveyard again and again, photographing from dawn to dusk, in the bloom of spring and the barrenness of winter.  

In some of his Oak City studies, Spanish moss hangs in diaphanous wisps of ghostly gray, like a ripped-up bridal gown. The light is so dim that nature starts to look supernatural.

In the elegiac “Oak City Cemetery, 1974,” a sprawling white camellia bush has wept white petals around a tombstone that says simply: “Mama.” On the November day of my visit, the camellias are showing off: dainty white hankies mottled with red; delicate pink powder puffs — winter’s roses. I think of my own mama, who lived nearby on a bluff overlooking the river. I think of that old song “I Come to the Garden Alone.” Mama loved it so much her preacher sang it at her funeral, on New Year’s Day, 2017.

In One Place, Kwilecki describes his home-town necropolis as a place where social station mimics real life — nothing unusual for a large and historic cemetery. But to him, every inch was “sacred furniture,” grandiose statues and Victorian filigree, barren bricks and sun-bleached conch shells. 

“Like us the conch lives, dies and leaves an empty shell,” Kwilecki wrote. That could be a metaphor for the cemetery itself. How long before time, weather and vandals obliterate it from this earth? How long before we are all just empty shells?

There’s a dash of irony in the way Kwilecki describes Bainbridge royals. He doesn’t name them. Oak City “retains in inventory the remains of a former governor of Georgia, a genuine duchess, a movie star, and an advisor to the president of the United States.” 

That would be the last of the state’s old-time segregationist governors, Marvin Griffin; the mysterious Marian Charlotte, Countess of Pau and Duchess of Navarre; Golden Age Hollywood actress Miriam Hopkins (a blond Southern bombshell whom Kwilecki loved and whose girlish vitality was mirrored, perhaps, in Charlotte); and Charles H. Kirbo, the Bainbridge-born lawyer who suggested Kwilecki take Jimmy Carter’s photo.

Now Charlotte and Paul have joined them all. Their marker is in the Kwilecki family plot, not far from Paul’s doting mother, Pearl, and his stern father, Julian Gerard. Reading Paul and Charlotte’s marker, on which their marriage date is etched over a pair of wedding bands, I notice they died just a year and two days apart: Charlotte first.  

Did Paul die of a broken heart? “I think so,” Elizabeth Whaley said. “We knew that when one died, the other wouldn’t be too long.”

In his journals, Kwilecki encounters death everywhere, and never recoils. He mourns the drowning of the 4-year-old child of a family friend. He attends many funerals, including the farewell for Mrs. Harry Grollman on a hot June morning in 1967 at Temple Beth-El:

I am always impressed at funerals by the attitude of the people in attendance toward the act of giving up one’s life. Either they can’t comprehend the vastness, the unpronounceable importance of it, or they refuse to allow themselves to look clearly upon it and project themselves into the place of the dead. On the one hand it is a morbid thing to do, but on the other, how can one come to terms with life unless he has also come to terms with death? Life and death are like good and evil, so interwoven, so dependent upon each other that one cannot study one and not the other.

One day, little Sarah Will Harris was playing with her dolls under her mother’s house, which sat high up off the ground and provided a cool spot in balmy Bainbridge.  Out of nowhere, a diminutive angel appeared.

“It spun around the chimney twice, then hung in the shadows below the floor joists, looking at Sarah. Gradually it became transparent until suddenly Sarah realized it was gone,” Kwilecki narrates in One Place. Sarah related the mysterious visitation to her mother, and when Sarah died of septicemia not long after, Mrs. Harris memorialized her daughter with a childlike marble angel at Oak City Cemetery. The inscription reads: “A Sunbeam From Earth Has Vanished.” It was 1926. Sarah was 7.

Kwilecki didn’t know about this Gothic visitation (which to me conjures Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe) until long after he began taking pictures of the grave.  He thought the statue looked like a child in a party dress, something both of this world and not.

“Instead of smiling beatifically, it appears to have something on its mind and is about to look up to say something,” he writes. He recorded its changes over the decades: black with mold, white and pristine, headless. “When its cheeks were dark with lichen it shed black tears. When it was newly cleaned it was happy, ready to play.” 

When I open a box of prints in the Duke archive and see the angel, I gasp.

Flint River, 1979 

Before I get to Bainbridge, I ask Jimmy Nicholson, who considers Kwilecki a mentor,  if he’d like to meet up at Oak City. He knows this graveyard better than me, and I need help identifying some of Kwilecki’s favorite subjects, including Sarah’s angel. When I arrive, Nicholson, who is 69, has pulled his white Toyota Avalon about as close to the Kwilecki plot as he can get it. He visits often; his parents are here, too. 

Later, over lunch at a local barbecue joint, Nicholson — who took photographs as a young man and started again after a career in the county school system — recounts his relationship with Kwilecki. Nicholson grew up in Bainbridge and lives now in nearby Quincy, Florida. His father ran the IGA grocery store on Broad Street, just a few blocks from the Kwilecki hardware store, and the Nicholsons went to the First Methodist Church, where Charlotte took the Kwilecki children. After graduating from Florida State University, Nicholson moved back home in 1976. He’d been playing around with a camera, and especially loved taking pictures of cemeteries and gravestones. 

One day, he says, he bumped into Kwilecki.

“We started talking about cameras and photography, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you come by the studio?’ And so I did. I met with him one Wednesday afternoon, because that was my afternoon off.” 

What he saw in Kwilecki’s studio was life-altering. “I had never seen anything like I beheld that particular day,” he recalls. “I had never seen my hometown depicted in the way he was depicting it. … And I’m going, ‘Whoa! This is what you can do with a camera!’ ”

Nicholson began stopping by for a weekly critique. 

“He started giving me books, Atget, Doris Ulmann, and August Sander. You name it, he had it. He would give it to me. Cartier-Bresson. All those famous people. W. Eugene Smith. People like that. ‘Take it home. Digest it. Come back and let’s talk about it.’ So we’d take photographs and we’d talk about them. … So it was this give-and-take thing. He’s trying to  teach me what constitutes a good photographer. …  He would get frustrated with my progress. Sometimes I wasn’t moving in a linear direction. It would be more fits and starts. But eventually I started making some interesting images. He was very encouraging.”

And sometimes rather blunt: He told Nicholson he was not a fan of photos of cats, dogs, or flowers. 

“He was intense,” Nicholson says. “Sometimes I’d come out almost crying because I thought they were good. He’d tell me sometimes, ‘You know you can give a chimpanzee a camera, and they’ll make a good picture every now and then.’ That’s something he would say. That’s pretty brutal, but I loved him.”

When I mention the chimpanzee remark to Rankin, he texts me back: “Paul was probably talking to himself as much as to Jimmy.”

Paul Kwilecki knew Bainbridge would change with the passing of time. The Broad Street scene he found so poignant in 1967 would not be recognizable today. 

Temple Beth-El was sold two years ago and is now an Airbnb. “Oh, it was bittersweet,” said Palmer, one of the last Jews of Bainbridge. “It’s sad. But it was time.” The building was in need of major repairs, and the congregation had dwindled.  

The synagogue’s holy books were buried in an unmarked plot in the Jewish section of Oak City Cemetery. The “Kwilecki chandelier” (Frances’ term)  remains, as well as a large, ornately decorated brass plaque listing the names of the dead. As in the cemetery, the family has its own section on the memorial, beginning with Isadore. 

Where there was once a downtown populated by a tight-knit community of Jewish merchants — the Grollmans, Wolffes, Kreses, Wynns,  Garfinkels, Rubinsteins, and Ehrliches, among others — there are now boutique hotels, good restaurants, a brewery. Fewer than 10 Jews remain, according to Palmer. 

Down by the Flint, Chason Park has been turned into a lavish, overbuilt public space that makes me cringe. When my mother lived next door, it felt like her side yard, a quiet haven of monumental oaks with an undergrowth of camellias.  (As Joni Mitchell would say, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”) 

Elizabeth Whaley and her husband, Don, have turned Kwilecki’s old office and darkroom into a community gathering space they call One Place. I meet Elizabeth and Frances there to look at some Kwilecki photographs and talk about their daddy.

It’s a chilly day, and as we are going in, Elizabeth shares a Charlotte-ism. Her mother would have said, “ ‘It’s ‘coldy-woldy.’ ”

I’ve asked to see Kwilecki’s Swine Time photos, but Elizabeth doesn’t know what I’m talking about. She brings pictures of prisoners killing hogs at the County Farm from the early 1980s. We get a good laugh out of that.

Elberta Crate & Box Company, 1982

The sisters share the responsibility of looking after their big brother, Paul, the eldest sibling, a retired lawyer with health challenges. 

It’s very hard for them to speak about their parents.

“We want to honor our daddy and his work,” says Elizabeth.

“We are very proud of him,” says Frances.

“It’s very emotional,” says Elizabeth, who has a daughter named Charlotte and a son named Paul. She calls Frances “Babe,” after the character in Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart” who says she killed her husband because she didn’t like his looks.

The sisters reminisce about the day last spring when the Boling film was shown for the first time, at the Firehouse Arts Center on Water Street. To accompany the screening, the Columbus-based Do Good Fund, which owns 78 Kwileckis, installed an exhibit.

“People were moved beyond words,” Elizabeth says, describing the day like a homecoming. “See, we didn’t have a funeral. Mama and Daddy didn’t want a funeral. To me, it was a celebration of their lives. And it was so joyful. And Daddy — Mama and Daddy — would have been so pleased that people understood him and appreciated the beauty of his work. It was just wonderful.” 

Elizabeth fishes into her pocket for something.

“What are you looking for?” Frances asks.

“A hanky,” Elizabeth says. “Mama always had a hanky. Daddy, too. We ironed Daddy’s handkerchiefs.”

After a while, it’s clear to me that the Paul Kwilecki I know from the journals is a stranger to them. To me, he’s the tortured artist, trying to figure out how to show the world what he sees in his heart. To them, he’s just Daddy, a man possessed by a gift they struggle to understand.

Photography was invented in France in 1822. The camera got to America just in time to capture the final decades of slavery, then the Civil War, images that are gruesome and troubling.

Kwilecki had thoughts on these early documentary photographers, who recorded the carnage as his grandfather was fleeing Europe.

“What separated the [Mathew] Bradys, the [Alexander] Gardners, and [Timothy H.] O’Sullivans from other Civil War photographers?” he said in a talk at Florida State in 1968. “Not subject matter. It was form. The gutted flour mills of Richmond seen across the river. Battlefields littered with cannonball and bodies. … Marshy, miasmic swamps seen with the bleakness and fatigue of the soldiers who had to trudge through them: These are pictures whose content is made devastating by form. They are hurled at us. The images fly off the page with a vengeance. They are not just dead. They are death.” 

Kwilecki knew that serious documentary recordkeeping requires rigor. To see where one fits into the continuum, one must know what came before. 

“The South has occupied an uneasy place in the history of American photography — as an example of regional exceptionalism and as the crucible from which American identity has been forged,” writes High Museum director Rand Suffolk in the foreword to the catalog for “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South,” the survey show that recently left the High on its way to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.  

In the 20th century, Depression-era photographers like Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott and Dorothea Lange shaped the narrative of the region as poor and backward. Around the world, these stereotypes became accepted fact. Kwilecki despised the genre, considering it propaganda shot by outsiders. 

During the Civil Rights Movement, photographers captured the hate and horror on the streets: Atlanta Klansmen, Selma marchers, Mississippi segregationists, Memphis assassins. Kwilecki didn’t see any of it because he rarely left home. And when he did venture outside the county? Forget about it. He didn’t even take his camera to New York. It would be “a busman’s holiday,” he said.

From the ’70s onward, many Southern photographers began to move in a more personal direction, sometimes documenting their families and children. While Kwilecki was teaching himself to be an artist, he did take pictures of his children, but once he’d found his Bainbridge project, that more or less stopped. Frances Kwilecki jokes that some of the family portraits his children have were snatched from the darkroom trash can.

While a few Southern photographers delved deep into a single place — William Christenberry in Hale County, Alabama; Oraien  Catledge in Atlanta’s Cabbagetown, for instance — most had lives and careers in other states. You’d have to go back to Eugène Atget, who shot Paris for 35 years in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, to find a comparable figure.

That very specificity was the genius of Kwilecki. And that very peculiarity most likely contributed to the narrow interest in his work. As some of his acolytes like to say, he’s the “greatest photographer you’ve never heard of.”

For  “A Long Arc,” the High chose one Kwilecki from its stash of 29 — which to be fair seems about right for a show that samples the whole of Southern photography from 1845 to the present — and it’s a dazzler: an electric portrait of a young Black woman sitting on the bumper of an old car in the impoverished Bainbridge neighborhood known as Battle’s Quarters. She’s shooting the photographer a tense gaze, as if to say, “Why are you here? What do you want?”

Then and now, those are fair questions. It’s possible that even Kwilecki would not have had ready answers. He was yearning to understand his place in the world by observing others. He was trying to unveil the essence of things.  ◊

Wendell Brock was a long-time editor, writer and critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Brock won a 2016 James Beard Foundation journalism award for profile writing. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Bitter Southerner, Saveur, Cooking Light, Delta Sky, Atlanta magazine and many others.