In Beebe, Donavon Smallwood Reflects on Ancestry and Land | Atmos

 

02.04.2024

Tender portraits of family, friends, and land offer an intimate glimpse into the photographer’s roots in smalltown Washington.

Beebe is an ongoing project on the paternal side of my family; one that explores our roots in smalltown Washington, North Carolina.

My earliest known ancestor was a member of a church named Beebe Chapel, which still has its foundation and burial grounds behind my grandmother’s home. With that reality in mind, I go out to photograph family members, friends—the land and the water that fractures it.

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The world’s first photograph was clicked by Niépce, born Joseph Nicéphore Niépce on March 7, 1765, in France, hailed from a family of means, with his father being a wealthy attorney. However, the family had to flee during the French Revolution. Nicéphore, originally named Joseph, adopted the name Nicéphore while studying at the Oratorian College in Angers, inspired by Saint Nicephorus. His studies at the college focused on experimental methods in science, leading him to become a professor.

Niépce served as a staff officer in Napoleon’s army, spending considerable time in Italy and Sardinia. Due to illness, he resigned and later married Agnes Romero. Afterward, he became the Administrator of the district of Nice before redirecting his efforts towards scientific research alongside his brother Claude at the family estate in Chalon.

In 1822, Niépce is credited with creating the world’s first photographic etching, using a camera obscura to capture an engraving of Pope Pius VII. Despite an unsteady hand and weak drawing skills, he pursued a way to permanently capture images, experimenting with silver chloride and later bitumen. His successful attempt involved dissolving bitumen in lavender oil, coating pewter, and exposing it inside a camera obscura. This process, taking over eight hours, produced the first surviving photo in 1825 – a building, barn, and tree.

Niépce’s invention, termed a Heliograph, faced challenges in gaining recognition. In 1829, he formed a partnership with Louis Daguerre to improve the process. Sadly, Niépce passed away in 1833 at the age of 69. Daguerre continued their collaboration, developing the Daguerreotype, and received credit for the invention, while Niépce’s contributions were largely overlooked.

Aside from his photographic achievements, Niépce, along with his brother Claude, invented the Pyreolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine, patented in 1807 by Napoleon Bonaparte.

In recognition of Niépce’s contributions, The Niépce Prize was established in 1955, awarded annually to a professional photographer with over three years of residency and work in France. Despite initial obscurity, Niépce’s groundbreaking work in photography was rediscovered in 1952, cementing his legacy as a pioneer in the field.

You might feel you have seen the woman sweeping the gutter in Mark Power’s 2018 photograph somewhere before. Her careful, stooped attitude, the improvised plastic aprons over the puffer jacket and the Dutch-looking point to her hood might all have stepped out of Vermeer’s The Little Street, painted in the 1650s. The brick facades of the row of houses in Baltimore, Maryland, picked out by Power’s large format camera, also gesture towards that Delft hyper-realism – and the implied social questions in the image echo across centuries and continents.

Like the Dutch painter, Power invites you to look hard at each brick, window and railing in his frame. The five houses here, in this precise light, start to take on troubled lives of their own – suspects in an identity parade of urban decline. The poster bottom right advertises the promise of “Total Rehabs”. The mattress at the window, the improvised door frames tell different stories.

Power’s photographs of America often work slowly on the viewer in this way. This picture comes from the fourth volume of the British photographer’s ongoing project Good Morning, America, which began with Barack Obama’s second term in 2012 and has taken in the existential uncertainties of the Trump years. His method seems in the tradition of the “survey” photographic quests that depicted the American landscape in pioneering prospectuses for railroads and westerly migration in the mid-19th century, but in many ways his photographs offer a before and after to those vistas: the scale and grandeur remain but those ambitions are undone in the detail of how things have worked out. Walking through left-behind districts such as this one or getting a vantage on rust-belt factories and drive-throughs and housing projects, his pictures give a constant feel of time arrested; and of the need for proper attention, in every sense.

• Good Morning, America (Volume IV) is published by Gost (£50)