The Picture Man was Paul Buchanan (ca. 1910-1987), an itinerant
photographer who, on foot, on horseback, and by car, wandered four
North Carolina mountain counties from 1920 until about 1951. He had
stopped making pictures for more than thirty years when Ann
Hawthorne, a photographer living in the mountains, heard about
Buchanan and went to see him. He told her stories--many of which
are transcribed in this book--and showed her some of his negatives,
which were filthy and, she thought, unprintable. Hawthorne cleaned
them up, though, and discovered a splendid photographer. Buchanan
didn't think of himself that way; he took pictures because it paid
well, and he was a professional who took pride in what he did.
Buchanan worked during years when the mountains were still
relatively isolated and when many outsider photographers tended to
stereotype the people who lived there, posing them in homespun
instead of their new store clothes, for instance. Buchanan, born
and raised in the mountains, never did that. These photographs are
posed pictures, but the subjects did the posing. They chose what to
wear and how to stand. In Paul Buchanan's pictures, then, we have a
pure record, a gifted photographer's portrait of the people as they
saw themselves. from Bruce Morton's introduction 'If I did take
them, ' Paul Buchanan said, 'they're good pictures. Good and
plain.' They are that, but they are something more as well. They
are history, or some of the stuff that history is made of: a few
more pieces of the quilt that is our memory, that tells us who we
were and who we are.
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