A Life Sold on Photography

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Paul Kwilecki’s day job was running a hardware store, but his passion was documenting his hometown, Decatur County, Ga. In the 1960s, the self-taught photographer wrote to such luminaries as Ansel Adams and David Vestal, hoping to get an honest assessment of his work.

Adams suggested he go for deeper tones of black. Vestal suggested he go deeper into his passion. “I know that to do the kind of work I want to do,” Vestal wrote, “photography can’t be a pastime or hobby.”

To the dismay of his wife, Mr. Kwilecki took that advice, selling his store in 1975 and devoting himself to detailing life in his hometown until he died in 2009 at the age of 81. He was fascinated by all aspects of Decatur County, especially its black agricultural farmers and working-class residents.

“I am taking my 35mm camera into places around here no cameras have ever gone,” he wrote in one letter to Ansel Adams. “Into shanties, into tawdry, small-town cafes (not the Robert Frank kind, the south-Georgia, bible-belt kind), into kitchens and hallways of farm houses, and there, in the middle of things these people live with, I make their pictures.”

Paul Kwilecki/The Estate of Paul Kwilecki, courtesy of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Williamson-Dicke Manufacturing, 1991.

Mr. Kwilecki was just as absorbed in combing through his archives for “One Place, Paul Kwilecki, and Four Decades of Photographs From Decatur County, Georgia” (University of North Carolina Press), which took a decade to compile. Tom Rankin, the book’s editor, said they went through Mr. Kwilecki’s entire archive and spent hours on the phone discussing each photo and its importance to Decatur’s history.

Mr. Kwilecki died before the book was published.

“He worked relentlessly, and I sometimes felt responsible for the book not being published sooner,” said Mr. Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. “I sometimes got the sense that he felt the process was taking too long.”

Mr. Kwilecki’s family roots in Decatur, one of Georgia’s largest counties, stretched back three generations to the early 1860s, when his grandfather, a Jewish immigrant, settled there as a teenager. The county had almost equal numbers of white residents and slaves. The family eventually settled in Bainbridge, a small city, where Mr. Kwilecki’s grandfather started a hardware business.

It was understandable that Mr. Kwilecki’s wife was upset when, a century later, he sold the store to pursue photography. His oldest daughter, Susan Kwilecki, remembers the day her father closed the family business.

“She was so embarrassed,” Ms. Kwilecki, 58, said of her mother’s reaction. “She couldn’t understand why he would do that. She adored my father, but she never really cared to understand his photography.”

Paul Kwilecki/The Estate of Paul Kwilecki, courtesy of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Sunday school class, Mount Zion A.M.E. Church, 1981.

Mr. Kwilecki’s wife wasn’t alone in her puzzlement. Many people in the community did not understand his work or his interest in photographing some of the town’s poorest residents, Susan Kwilecki said, and he grew increasingly frustrated at being misunderstood.

But that only pushed him harder to pursue his work.

“I am frequently asked by people who have not seen my work why I spend my life documenting one simple place like Decatur County, Georgia,” he wrote. “People confuse simple with small; they’re not the same thing.”

He acknowledged that the problems of his neighbors might be different from those in big cities â€" but, he said, they were no less threatening.

Ms. Kwilecki, who is a professor of religious studies at Radford University in Virginia, said that like many girls growing up in a small town, she often dreamed of leaving Bainbridge. But some of her favorite childhood memories are of going out with her father and watching him photograph.

“He was just really good at connecting with people, with anyone, really,” she said. “There were just things he saw in people that no one else really saw.”

There were several projects he revisited over the years, including his tobacco series, the local court house, rural churches, Flint River and Oak City Cemetery â€" where he was later buried in the Jewish section, next to his wife.

He published his first book, “Understandings: Photographs of Decatur County, Georgia,” in 1981. But even with the positive response, he was still not satisfied with his representation of the area. He published another book, “Lowly Wise, Book One: Scenes of Religion in and Around Decatur County, Georgia,” in 1992, this time without the support of a publishing company.

Paul Kwilecki/The Estate of Paul Kwilecki, courtesy of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Horace Battles, Elberta Crate and Box Company, 1981.

He spent a large part of his career in rural churches, documenting countless baptisms and Sunday sermons. Despite being Jewish, he considered himself secular and, according to his daughter, his photographs were his attempt to understand the unseen world of faith.

“Daddy would say he was documenting the physical while watching the spiritual,” Ms. Kwilecki said.

Ms. Kwilecki and her father actually collaborated on a book about faith, “Becoming Religious: Understanding Devotion to the Unseen,” featuring his photographs from black churches and a selection of her interviews with pastors and congregants.

Mr. Kwilecki cataloged his prints meticulously by location, time and even camera settings, taking copious and detailed notes. On one photograph he took in 1969 at Oak City Cemetery, he wrote:

“Angel on Harris Grave. Oak City Cemetery, Bainbridge, GA. Another in my continuing series on the angel. Photographed: Sunday, November 30, 1969. 8 AM. Very cold. Sun just rising, throwing very soft light, diffuse, beautiful. Deardorff 5 x 7. Film: Tri-X. ASA 100. F. 45 @ 5 seconds. Development in tank D-76-25%.”

He eventually moved his darkroom from his house to a small office in downtown Bainbridge and continued to write letters to Vestal, who became a mentor and friend.

“I have never liked the hardware business,” he admitted in one letter, “and I seem to be getting more and more engrossed in making photographs, so the most sensible move seemed to be to get out of the hardware and into photography.”

Though Bainbridge has no bookstore, Mr. Kwilecki’s old neighbors will be able to buy his book at the local drugstore. It’s almost as fitting a homecoming as a photo Mr. Rankin recently received from one of Mr. Kwilecki’s children. It shows the book atop his grave. In Bainbridge. Where it belongs.

Paul Kwilecki/The Estate of Paul Kwilecki, courtesy of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Junior-Senior Prom, Willis Park, 2001.

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