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Camera Man's Journey
Julian Dimock's South
Edited by Thomas L. Johnson and Nina
J. Root "A vivid, moving story wherein the images
bring to life unspoken words that strongly remind us that this
world of downtrodden and oppressed people whose spirits did not
break was never meant to be silent."
--Dori Sanders
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"Dimock
destroys myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions with its images
of a spirited and persevering people."
--Cleveland L. Sellers
Jr.
"If
Dimock's photographs fail to depict the repression and violence
that circumscribed black life, they do suggest, often quite
eloquently, how black South Carolinians endured, the extraordinary
resourcefulness, spirit, and resiliency they displayed."
--Leon
Litwack
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A
poignant collection of 155 photographs,
Camera Man's Journey takes us to a place at once familiar and foreign. Set in the South
early in the twentieth century, these photographs bridge a
distance not only of time but also of contrasting attitudes and
customs.
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The images show African
Americans in or around Columbia, Beaufort, and Hilton
Head, South Carolina. Some photographs were taken in
surroundings where blacks might associate with whites--out
of necessity and according to strict custom.
Most of the images,
however, are set in "colored sections" or other
remote areas of town or country where blacks were obliged
to fashion lives apart. Under segregation and
disenfranchisement, men, women, and children are portrayed
in ordinary occupations and pursuits: a peddler selling
his wares, a woman tying a toddler's shoes, a barber and
his young apprentice taking a break outside their shop. |
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Julian Dimock, whose works appeared often in major travel and nature
magazines, took the photographs in 1904-5. So many photographers
of the era tended to romanticize or politicize their
African-American subjects; Dimock was different. Signs of want and
inequity are plain to see in these images, but Dimock portrays his
subjects as they reall were in all of their dignity, strength, and
beauty.
-- Georgia Book News |
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Julian Dimock (1873-1945) was born in New Jersey
and traveled widely across the United States, taking photographs
on his own and as part of many scientific and sporting
expeditions. The fifth of six children, Julian Anthony Dimock
was the son of Anthony and Helen Weston Dimock, only two of
their children survived to adulthood.
Dimock abruptly ended his photography career in 1917 upon the
death of his father, whom as a writer, was also his frequent
traveling companion and collaborator. Dimock went on to become a
highly regarded orchardist, planting 1600 trees and an
exponent of conservation. |
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According to Nina J. Root: "He was
instrumental in developing the seed potato as an important
Vermont crop and also participated in the state's reforesting
project of planting red and Scotch pines. he served as town
auditor for sixteen years and was know as the best apple grower
in the area. Today his farm is still known as the "Dimock
Orchard."
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Table of Contents
Foreword (Dori Sanders)
Preface (Cleveland L. Sellers Jr.)
Acknowledgments (Nina J. Root and Thomas L. Johnson)
Julian Dimock: Reluctant Camera Man (Nina J. Root)
Mr. Smalls's and Mr. Dimock's South Carolina (Thomas L. Johnson)
JULIAN DIMOCK'S PHOTOGRAPHS
Afterword (Leon F. Litwack)
Bibliography
About the Authors
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| Contributors:
Thomas L. Johnson has been a field archivist associated
for more than twenty-five years with the South Caroliniana
Library at the University of South Carolina, where for many
years he also taught a course on South Carolina writers. A
True Likeness, a book he co-edited on the work of black
photographer Richard Samuel Roberts of Columbia (1880-1936), won
a Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council in
1986. He has won prizes for both his poetry and his short
fiction, and he serves as an honorary life member on the board
of governors of the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
Leon F. Litwack, the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison
Professor of American History at the University of California,
Berkeley, has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two
Distinguished Teaching Awards, and a National Endowment for the
Humanities Film Grant. His book Been in the Storm So Long
(1979), an account of America's experience with emanicipation,
won the Pulitzer Prize in history and the Parkman Prize. The
late C. Vann Woodward called its 1998 sequel, Trouble in the
Mind, "the most complete and moving account we have had
of what the victims of the Jim Crow South suffered and somehow
endured."
Nina J. Root, a native New Yorker, received her
bachelor's degree at Hunter College and a master's degree from
Pratt Institute. She served as Director of Library Services at
the American Museum of Natural History for twenty-seven years.
Before coming to the museum she was head of Reference, Science
and Technology Division, Library of Congress, where she was
given a Meritorious Service Award. She is the author of numerous
books and articles on the history of natural history and on the
Library's collections. Today she holds the title of Director
Emerita of the AMNH Library and continues to work with
collections, lecture, write, and travel.
Dori Sanders, a peach farmer from York County, South
Carolina, saw her first novel, Clover (1990), published
to immediate critical and popular acclaim. It received a Lillian
Smith Award, has gone into ten hardback printings and numerous
paperback ones, has been translated into five foreign languages,
and was made into a major Walt Disney Film. Another novel, Her
Own Story, appeared in 1993, and Dori Sanders' Country
Cooking, in 1995. Her work has been characterized as
"Southern writing at its best" and has been compared
to that of Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Cleveland L. Sellers Jr. is director of the African
American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina,
where he also teaches in the History Department. The River of
No Return, published in collaboration with Robert Terrell in
1973 and in a 1990 edition with an afterword by Sellers, is his
insider's account of the rise and fall of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and of his involvement in the
1968 Orangeburg Massacre, including his arrest and subsequent
imprisonment. It is considered one of the two or three most
important books to have come out of the Civil Rights Movement
Camera Man's Journey The
University of Georgia Press-330 Research Drive-Athens, Georgia
30602-4901 |
* * * * *
Thomas L. Johnson has been a field archivist for
more than twenty-five years with the South Carolinian Library at the
University of South Carolina. His 1986 book, A True Likeness, coedited
with Phillip C. Dunn, won a coveted Lillian Smith Award from the
Southern Regional Council.
Nina J. Root is Director Emerita of the Research Library at
the American Museum of Natural History, where, among other
accomplishments, she cataloged the Julian Dimock photograph collection. * * * * *
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updated 4 October 2007 |
