ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 6, 1996 TAG: 9603060068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
PHOTOGRAPHER EARL PALMER'S negatives preserve after his death the positives he saw in Appalachian life.
Toward the end of his life, Earl Palmer yearned for Appalachia, the homeland this legendary photographer viewed through a rose-colored camera lens.
``But everyone I knew is gone,'' he'd say, knowing that he would soon follow.
Palmer, 90, died Monday at his Christiansburg home, but he left behind many keepsakes of his lifelong love affair with mountains and mountain people.
The black-and-white images he recorded during countless trips into the Appalachian hinterlands preserved a culture Palmer believed was too admirable to lose.
Renown and praise came to Palmer late in life, when his work came to the academic community's attention. He came to be recognized as one of Appalachia's great photographers.
``It's a picture of traditional, cultural life in Appalachia that probably Earl documented as well as anyone ever has,'' said Jean Speer, author of a book about his work.
However, for most of his life, Palmer was a storekeeper who never earned enough money from photography to quit his day job.
Born in 1905, Palmer grew up in an Eastern Kentucky mining camp and always felt comfortable within the margins of a mountain ridge. ``I've lived in the mountains all my life. I don't know any different,'' he liked to say.
His foster mother saved coffee can labels to buy Palmer his first camera when he was 7 years old. As a young man Palmer managed grocery stores in mountain communities as he refined his photography skills.
A garrulous man and a master storyteller, Palmer made friends easily. Mountaineers were his favorites, moonshiners in particular.
In 1943 Palmer was arrested for selling sugar to a moonshiner, a charge he eluded by a backwoods plea bargain: He traded bootleg whiskey to a judge in turn for probation. That incident prompted Palmer's move to Cambria - at the time a small community near Christiansburg - where he opened a store.
Beginning in the late 1940s, he and fellow shutterbug Frank Shelton would pack up Palmer's old station wagon for weekend trips. They'd leave at 5 p.m. Friday, arrive in far Southwestern Virginia or Eastern Kentucky by midnight, sleep in the back of the wagon and start shooting pictures when the day began.
``I'd do the driving and he'd size up the pictures,'' Shelton recalls.
Palmer's energy and curiosity led him to remote hollows where mountain people lived the same primitive, self-sufficient lives of many previous generations. His affability readily broke down any barriers, Shelton says.
``He could just weave his way right on in. They would just lock him in with open arms.''
With his twin-lens Rolleiflex camera, Palmer brought out the extraordinary in commonplace moonshiners, farmers, weavers and fiddle-makers. Not a photojournalist - despite the authenticity his sharp black-and-white images capture - Palmer never hesitated to manipulate the scene to fit his world view of Appalachia.
``He was an artist. He wasn't trying to be a documentary photographer,'' Speer said. ``He wanted to show people what he thought was the best of Appalachian life.''
The old ways were best, he believed, so Palmer photographed handmade and downhome subjects: mule-drawn plows, log cabins, apple-butter making, river baptisms, quilt sewing, ham curing.
Palmer's been called the Norman Rockwell of Appalachia for his romanticism. Yet he was also a painstaking and skilled technician, said Speer, a former Virginia Tech professor who now heads East Tennessee State's Center for Appalachian Studies and Services.
``People could always recognize an Earl Palmer photograph. He had a particular style. You would know it was his.''
Palmer also was a civic leader. He served as mayor of Cambria for 10 years, until that community merged with Christiansburg in 1964.
In 1986, Palmer donated about 200 of his pictures to Virginia Tech. He remained active until recent years, when he was diagnosed with the cancer that claimed his life.
His wife, Evelyn, said Palmer wanted his precious collection of negatives donated to Berea College, a small Kentucky institution.
His funeral will be at 2 p.m. Thursday at Belmont Christian Church. Burial will be at Sunset Cemetery in Christiansburg.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1989 Earl Palmer's longtime loves of Appalachian lifeby CNBand photography gained him fame and respect late in life.
2. EARL PALMER Palmer, who grew up in an Eastern Kentucky coal town,
shot this photo of a miner and his son near Pippa Passes, Ky., in
the early 1950s.
3. EARL PALMER Newt Hylton, one of Palmer's favorite subjects,
directed restoration of Mabry Mill during creation of the Blue
Ridge Parkway.