Brownie Camera

The other day I had such a nice surprise, telephone rang, and that was not the surprise, but the newspaper editor from down in Camden, Alabama, Hollis Cull, on the other end of the phone, and he had known Hollis for many years, Hollis said to me, I have something exciting for you. And I said, oh, is the ferry running between G's Ben and Camden? But I've been waiting for years for that ferry to be an operating fee. I don't know what happened to all the money that they invested in putting a ferry between G's Ben and Camden, and the first time they tried to run it, it met with disaster, and I don't know what the status of the ferry is at the moment. But I'm very interested in that ferry, and I want to be one of the first passengers to ride on the ferry, because I thought maybe Hollis was telling me that the ferry was running, and he said, oh no, no, it's more personal than that. He said, I read a long time ago that your photographic career started when you got a camera from the Eastman

Kodak Company in 1930, the year that they were celebrating an anniversary and gave free brownie cameras, box cameras, to children who were 12 years old all over the United States. And all you had to do was be first or be second of being blind early enough at the dealers to get a free camera. And he said, I've been thinking about that lately, and said, I've been online, and I've been working on the year, but I have found you one of those cameras, just like you had. Well, I just couldn't believe it. That Hollis had actually spent time trying to find one of those cameras, because I have no notion what happened to mine. No exactly how it looked, and oh, it gave me such a pleasure. But Hollis told me he found it online at a state sale in Vermont. And it's now in Camden, Alabama, sitting on his

desk waiting for me to come down and get it. And he says it seems to be in perfect working condition that everything looks almost like brand new, that it's obviously been on somebody's shelf in the closet for maybe 75 years, because that's how long it's been. But I thought about that first camera and what joy it gave me. A few years ago, a book of my photographs was published, a book called Encounters. And the editors picked out what they considered my finest photographs over a period of 70 years, and included them in that book. And the strange thing to me is that they chose among the countless others, three pictures that I made with that brownie camera when I was 12 years old. And one of them, I still consider

the best picture I've ever made. It's a picture of a woman standing on the porch, an old woman, and she has a spinning wheel. It has white hair that's done in a bun and dressed as long, and she's has a hand on that spinning wheel. And the light is exactly right in that picture. And the composition is exactly right. And I don't know how I knew that at 12 years old, how I could do that with a brownie camera, a box camera. It took only one picture at a time then, because you had to roll it up to the next picture. It wasn't one of these things you could just keep shooting innumerable times. I don't say, you can fail to get a good picture with the modern cameras. You just keep on shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting. It's so different from the way that it is. But I looked at that picture and I wondered about it. And then

there's another in there of my friends, my playmates Evelyn and Tees Cleveland. I played with them every day of my life. They lived about three blocks from me and Thomasville. And Evelyn was my age and she got one of those brownie cameras from the Eastman Code Act company. And it is a picture that I took of them standing beside an old airplane at it, Mr. Sid Hamilton's pasture. The plane took you up. Oh, to go up was the big thing. On Sunday afternoon, you paid a dollar and you could go up and ride all over Thomasville. And Evelyn and Tees are standing beside that plane waiting to go up. And Evelyn is holding a camera, the bare camera that she got. And just like the one that I took the picture with. And then the other picture made with that same brownie camera was one of Hiram Davis. A black man, a colored man, he was an X-sleeve, the only X-sleeve I've

ever known. He used to walk to Thomasville and you see him on the streets there, especially around people's drugstore corner. And he talked to people and tell them stories about slavery times. One day when he was talking to some people, I was there with my brownie camera and I took a photograph of him. And after that book came out and after many people had seen that photograph and others, I got in the mail one day, a packet that had on the outside photograph, do not bend. And I opened it up. And it was from a member of Hiram Davis's family, from his great grandson who was, there were four generations of Davis's in that photograph. And they had had the picture of Hiram Davis enlarged and they were standing in front of that.

And I don't know that anything has ever moved me much more than the fact that this family had gathered in front of a picture that I had made when I was 12 years old. I have a family photograph made. So I mean you could go get that brownie camera and see if I can find any film for it. Take some more pictures. Maybe there'll be just that good. I hope so.