ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609100107
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO 1. MICHAEL
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
FOR the better part of a decade, Michael Harrington caught them in the rapid but steady flick of his 35mm camera shutter: People who live a way of life that is fast being snuffed out by television, computers and chain stores.
Appalachian Folk, he calls them.
There was Miss Irene Cole, a homebody who taught at a school within sight of her own front porch. She lived her life in the house where she was born, until she had to move to a nursing home.
There was Herbert Hoover, a gentle and unassuming man despite his presidential name. He had little formal schooling, but he was well-read in agronomy and ecology and farmed without the use of chemicals. He wouldn't let anyone kill groundhogs on his land; he was convinced their burrows help the circulation of soil moisture.
And there was Sena Roberts, a tough-as-nails schoolteacher with two master's degrees.
When she was in her 70s, she had to go into the hospital after a cow kicked her.
Harrington called her and said, "Sena, did you get even with that steer?"
"Ground it into hamburger," she replied.
Harrington, a Marion native, collected pictures of them and many others as a photojournalist around Southwest Virginia, working first for the Smyth County News and later out of his private studio in Marion.
Some people suggested he pull them together into a book, but he wasn't sure about the cost or whether it would sell.
He had a different idea: He published 20 of his best shots on his own line of "Appalachian Folk" greeting cards.
He had 100,000 printed up - 5,000 of each shot. And while he's got them in less than a dozen outlets so far ("I'm still getting the marketing bugs out"), they're selling well in places where they are available.
At Books, Strings & Things on Roanoke's City Market, for example, many of the cards sold out, and the store has had to reorder more. Harrington is also planning to market the cards on his new Web page: www.area-net.com/harrington.htm.
For Harrington, the greeting cards are partly about making money, and partly about "trying to preserve this lifestyle for posterity - capture and record people who are well worth documenting."
"These people are a dying breed," Harrington, 40, says. "They've lived in the hollows, worked the land. They're proud people. They've had hard lives."
The cards are blank on the inside so senders can write their own greetings. But the back of the cards include a brief bio for each of the photo subjects.
On one card Harrington describes Homer Davenport, a man who has never had a Social Security number, this way: "Homer Davenport has survived a lot of rough living on and around Clinch Mountain, including bites from at least three poisonous snakes - a timber rattler and two copperheads. A self-taught 'medicine man' who knows many old Appalachian remedies, Mr. Davenport crushes up wild onions and applies them to the snakebite to 'draw out the poison.'''
Harrington's interest in photography began with his aunt, Jane Preston, who lives in Botetourt County. "I thought she was the greatest photographer ever," he says. Not long ago, he was looking through some old albums with his aunt and ran across a photo of himself when he was about three years old, wearing a cowboy outfit replete with toy six-guns. "I said: 'I don't guess you have a negative of it?' She said, `Oh yes, just a second,' and went and pulled it out."
It wasn't until he was serving in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in 1970s that he took up photography. Later he studied art at East Tennessee State University and took a job as a photographer at the Smyth County News, a weekly newspaper.
Without a lot of earth-shattering news in the slow-moving environs of Southwest Virginia, Harrington gravitated to lifestyle photos of folk out in the backroad farm communities.
"My publisher didn't like them," Harrington recalls. "He always was ragging on me, calling them my `front porch pictures.' I think, as with most publishers, he had no artistic taste. He wanted `hard-news' pictures."
He recalls going out to Flatridge to see Joe Ross, who operated a small sawmill. Ross reached under his saw table and pulled out a half-gallon of Jack Daniels and "took a big swag" and then handed the bottle to Harrington. Thinking it might be an insult to refuse, Harrington "took a big swag of his Jack Daniels and proceeded to photograph him. And got some really good pictures of him."
Harrington left the newspaper in 1989 to open his studio, where he does a variety of photography, including "fine-art nudes" that sparked a bit of a controversy in Marion when he put one in his window a while back.
People who live along the Appalachian mountain range are sensitive about hillbilly stereotypes, which are often played up on television and in the movies. Harrington's photos include folk who have lived quite different lives from people who prefer the consumer-driven, convenience-dependent culture of today's modern cities or suburbs.
But Harrington doesn't believe his cards put Appalachians in a bad light. In fact, he said, he's sold a lot of prints of the photos to subjects' families.
"I don't think that the cards make fun of anybody," he says. "They're factual cards. The stuff on them is true."
Many of the people in the series didn't have a lot of education, Harrington says, "but still in their own way they're very intelligent. They have a lot of common sense. They've survived through their common sense, hard work and thriftiness."
On the card showing Dar Compton taking a break from working his farm near Black Hill, Harrington notes that the horse lover never used tractors.
"He died from a heart attack while squirrel hunting, a way to go that any hunter would appreciate," Harrington writes. "When found, he had three of the bushytails in his game bag."
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