The Lens of Reflection | Pete Candler, Author, Photographer and Filmmaker

Pete Candler wears many creative hats. He’s a photographer and maker of short films—all of it self-taught—and he’s also an author and recovering academic.

His new book, titled “A Deeper South," is both an internal and external travelogue over 25 years of road trips through the American South. We’ll also talk about leaving a tenured professorship at Baylor University to pursue his creative impulses, why he has always been drawn to photographing places rather than people and his discovery of a family history too close for comfort to the vestiges of slavery.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: You were tenured and had spent 10 years at Baylor University. You didn't want to be in academia anymore. Were you already committed to your writing when you made that decision? 

Pete Candler:  That's a great question. And we could spend the whole time talking about that, but I'll try to be brief. I think. When I first left academia, no, the project that I'm working on now didn't materialize until later.

I had this wild idea that I wanted to leave academia, write fiction, and move our family back to the southeast where my wife and I are both from. And of course you have these images in your head that, oh, I'll write a novel. It will become moderately successful or allow me to live like the life of an artist. That didn't happen, which will surprise no one listening to this.

But ultimately, the story of how "A Deeper South" emerged was its own kind of set of convergences that could never really have predicted, but I left academia because I ultimately found that it wasn't really a good fit for me. I felt like I was not really a scholar. I loved doing research. I loved being around libraries.

I enjoyed teaching. I love this sort of vibe of a university community. And I could, at one point, imagine myself being in that world for the rest of my life and being perfectly happy. And like Everything, maybe your experience in journalism was like this, the reality once you get inside it is quite different and University life right now is certainly different than I expected it to be.

Universities are under all kinds of pressures, especially in the humanities, and they're really like an endangered species.

Matt Peiken: Let me ask you when you decided to make the shift and you mentioned "A Deeper South", but it seems like you laid a lot of cobblestones en route to "A Deeper South", whether it was your photo book, your films that you've been You've done in the prelude to this, and I'm wondering what you brought from academia in terms of your own practice, your own research.

You said you were, you really liked the research. You came from a theological background and study. What of that background served you well, or maybe was a hindrance in things you had to cast aside as you stepped into your own work that wasn't shaped by provosts and deans of departments and you could cast your own way?

Pete Candler: That's a great question. It took me some time to realize, looking back what was the thing that was connecting "A Deeper South" with the work I had done in a more strictly scholarly or academic vein? And I didn't really figure it out until I was already into it for a couple of years.

And my PhD dissertation, which became a book that no one read was about memory and about the way memory in the middle ages, the art of memory, which is a huge thing. Going back to the classical period shaped the way theological texts were organized. So it was, I was trying to show how certain texts were, particularly in Thomas Aquinas, for example, were organized according to this idea of memory and that you're actually, while you're proceeding through the text, you're actually enacting a kind of collective memory and participating in this sort of journey into the memory of, in Thomas's case, the memory of the church, the memory of the Christian community. 

Matt Peiken: Is this what you mean by the art of memory? I hadn't heard that term before. Explain that a little more. 

Pete Candler: Yeah. The art of memory goes back to figures like Cicero, Quintilian, and another anonymous author from the Latin world. Those are the main authorities. Cicero was an orator, so his basic shtick as a lawyer was giving speeches.

And in order for Cicero to be able to remember speeches, he used this art of, this artificial memory, it was called. And, he had this technique where you imagine yourself Inside of a house and in each room of the house, you place a different item that corresponds to a point you want to make in your speech.

So let's say you have in the foyer, you have a purse that reminds you that this is a case about theft. And then you go to proceed to the next room and there's something else that reminds you of like paragraph two or the next point in your argument. And so As you're proceeding through this artificial, this imaginary house, you're at the same time making this speech, constructing a work of oratory while you're performing this act of artificial memory.

Matt Peiken: How did this at all inform your approach to what ended up as your photo book, "The Road to Unforgetting", the connection there, obviously, is memory forgetting. And is that something you were mindful of as you were taking these photos? Or did that just develop as you then were coming back and revisiting your photos and seeing what the connecting points were?

How did the art of memory Tie into what turned into your photo book, "The Road to Unforgetting".

Pete Candler: I think it totally came after the fact for me. When I left academia, I took up some of those things that I felt like the culture of academia had pushed out of my main sort of area of interest, like certain forms of music, photography, certain literature. And. Yeah, I felt dismembered.

That's one way I'd describe it. And so leaving academia was, in a way an attempt to put myself back together, to re member myself. And the way "The Road to Unforgetting" came about was, I think at some point in the past I had this vague notion that maybe I'd do a photography book. I would take enough pictures and I guess you can make a book out of them.

But it was only when "A Deeper South", the project emerged in around early 2018 and I went back at this trove of negatives that I had. I had basically contact sheets in some cases, and just sleeves and sleeves of negatives.

Matt Peiken: And you hadn't necessarily planned to do anything with them, they were just, in the moment you're traveling, which I want to get to in a moment, about your impetus for these travels and the route you took. The subtitle of your book is called Detours in the American South, which I know plays into the title of your podcast, the detourist. There's a lot of connecting points here, but you were just taking these photos. You were still a professor at Baylor, right? You were there until 2013. These photos date from 97 through 2022.

So into the pandemic, so that's 25 years span. So what was it for you that only decades later did it turn into what came up to be a book? 

Pete Candler: I think early on when I started, I certainly didn't have a sense of myself as a photographer. I think I just shot pictures I thought it looked cool. Maybe there was an an attempt to document.

But it was really only in going back that I discovered, I think, the power of photography and particularly film photography. A lot of the photography I did. And the first few trips that we took together was naive in the sense that I just, I don't have any formal background in photography, I just follow my instinct and maybe I'll frame something.

I didn't know what rules I was breaking. And when I went back and looked at these negatives starting in, 2018, I started to look at my own pictures as differently, they came back to me in a way and they revealed something that I didn't see the first time. 

Matt Peiken: And these were almost always places, right? That you weren't photographing people very much, right? 

Pete Candler: Very rarely. Now that you mentioned that, I was very early on uneasy about photographing people, and I still am. 

Matt Peiken: Which is a whole different approach. The entirety of filming people, of shooting people, it's a very, it's a different kind of intimacy, a different kind of Voyeurism, invasion in some cases, or a sensitivity in a way that can come through and be communicated through images with people that isn't necessarily when you're doing the landscape and landmarks and other things.

And it seemed You were more comfortable just shooting places and landscapes. 

Pete Candler: Yes, and you're absolutely right about street photography. There's a big controversy nowadays about the propriety of street photography. Is it okay to just go out and take pictures of strangers without their permission?

Matt Peiken: Tell me if I'm off base here, but I would imagine your academic background in a way was a wall of demarcation that you felt comfortable.

It was more of a research based approach, it was a documentation of your travels. And your, what you observed approach rather than conversations you were getting into and, I would think that it probably didn't even really occur to you to have people be prominently in your photos.

Pete Candler: It really didn't. There's an image from our first trip in 1997, which we began in Atlanta and headed south on U. S. 19. U. S. 41 to Plains, Georgia, and I was taking a picture out in front of the Some of your listeners may remember the Billy Carter service station Billy Jimmy's, I think he was his younger brother.

Matt Peiken: His wayward brother. 

Pete Candler: His wayward brother, the black sheep of the of the Carter family who ran a gas station in Plains. It was just deteriorating. There was a marquee out front, and I was taking a picture of a Phillips 66 sign on a U. S. 280 that runs through Plains, and there's a, an African American man walking towards the camera.

And I took the picture, I don't really know what I was intending to take it of. But he's walking towards the camera, he's a little bit out of focus. But he's looking directly at me. And that was the last picture of a person I took for a long time. 

I look back at that image after a separation of 25 something years, and it was something really deeply uncomfortable about it. Not just that, am I invading this guy's space, but it's he was looking at me, like interrogating me. And I started to just really develop a sense of awe over the power of film to communicate over time differently and to reveal something that I didn't see for 20 something years. 

Matt Peiken: And these were still for yourself, you didn't necessarily have an aspiration around it until 2018 when you're going through these negatives. So in their final years of your photography, which extended from 2018 to 2022 is the cutoff.

Were you also shooting digital movies? 

Pete Candler: I was shooting digital. Movies, but not digital still images. 

Matt Peiken: So it's still On your same travels though, you would go out and do both. 

Pete Candler: Yeah. Do both. So I'd carry for the photography nerds out there, I have two Nikon F3s from the 1980s that are just workhorses.

They're not perfect. They're banged up. The viewfinder is damaged. It doesn't even work on one of them. I have to guess the exposure. But they're pretty indestructible. They have a certain look to them. The F three had electronics in it, but it was last basically fully mechanical camera that Nikon made. 

Matt Peiken: I guess I was just wondering though, but without getting into the technicalities of it, what was going on inside you that would inspire you to say, oh, I'm gonna pick up my Nikon and shoot some still imagery.

Oh, I'm going to take my digital camera and shoot some film. When you reach that fork in the road, what inspired you to go in which one way? 

Pete Candler: Yeah, I was always carrying the film camera around me and then it would sometimes would carry the video camera with me when I've gotten to a place where I felt there was something and some of it was just Logistical like we're gonna be here for a little bit.

So I've got I'm gonna shoot some video. And so that first 2018 trip, the first or second night we were in Fargo, Georgia, and I just took my digital camera out and just started wandering around shooting B roll basically, and then just trying to capture the feel of this place. And for me, the way those, what came, I came to call deeper South shorts we're like three to six minute loosely edited.

Just shot on the fly. There's no agenda like the detour is there's no map. It just make it up as you go. 

If you're not familiar with Fargo, it is such a specific place. It is at the bottom of the Okefenokee Swamp, way South Georgia.

You can't go any farther South. Very different landscape. And that part of Georgia is just itself kind of magical. The Suwannee River flows right through town and it's tiny.

There is a motel in Fargo called the Gator Motel, it has four rooms. And I just started filming and then asked the proprietor, his name is Kevin Hart, not the comedian, but a local who runs the Gator Motel, if you would just tell us about the motel. One of the things that really revealed to me was just how ubiquitous these stories are. They're everywhere and you cannot make this stuff up. And if you only stop long enough to just ask or talk to someone, they just start coming out. At the time there was an Outfitters there, it's not anymore, and there were like five or six locals just sitting on the benches in front of this gas station. That's their job. That's their job. They are, yeah, talk about the guardians of memory of this place.

They were just sitting there and I was like, do you mind if I just film you? And they were like, oh, totally. They could care less. 

Matt Peiken: Oh, wow. That's interesting that you asked. Was this the first time you had ever asked anyone if you could film them? That 

Pete Candler: had ever asked. I 

Matt Peiken: can imagine you being a little nervous.

Pete Candler: I was a little nervous. The only thing that one of those guys said was like, just don't put it on the Facebook, which I didn't. I put it everywhere else. 

Matt Peiken: Now tell me about your decision to start working on something that turned into your narrative for "A Deeper South". You were working in moving pictures and still images. When did you start wanting to put written word down to some of this, and how did that change your approach to your travels?

Pete Candler: They really happened simultaneously. I was in Pasadena, California in early 2018. I think it was maybe February or something. Buddy of mine, Tom Zellner, who's a fantastic writer who writes about the road. Tom, by the way, is also an editor for Los Angeles Review of Books and he really encouraged me to go back on the road And to this time, to really be intentional about writing it up. 

Matt Peiken: Which changes a project immensely. It does. What were you able to tell in a narrative, in a written narrative, or what did you seek to tell in a written narrative that you felt your photos and films didn't quite capture?

Pete Candler: Some of that was I had been learning about my own family's history. And that's really the thing that made this not just a Spectators account of traveling through the South. I got sent to Montgomery by the Christian Century magazine to write about the opening of the lynching memorial there that had just opened in April 2018.

And I get there, and the actual memorial was closed but the bookstore happened to be open attached to the legacy museum, which was right down on commerce street in Montgomery.

And so I'm browsing the bookstore and I buy this book called at the hands of persons unknown by Philip Dre. It's about the lynching of black Americans and I get this book and the first page is about the lynching of Sam Hose in Noonan, Georgia in 1899.

Okay, obviously this, I'm finding this guy's name everywhere. I turn the page and it's Governor Alan Daniel Candler, pro lynching governor of Georgia from 1898 to 1902. 

Matt Peiken: Did you know about this relative? 

Pete Candler: I knew him by name, that's it. And this was like a punch in the gut, I had never heard this before.

And I know like the Candler name is it's pretty prominent in Atlanta and Alan would have been my great great grandfather's first cousin. I had certainly never heard about his attitude towards lynching, and I had never even heard about Sam Hose or this episode in 1899.

Matt Peiken: How did you choose to approach this in your work?

Pete Candler: In a way it wasn't a choice so much as here I am like reading the definitive history of lynching of black Americans. And my family name is on page two and I cannot just pretend like I did not just read that.

Matt Peiken: You pepper your narrative like different chapters of the south and different personal stories, some connected to you, some not. I know you went to the town where Emmett till was killed.

Yeah, and Deliberately to tell a story there that hadn't been told really spotlighted very much. 

Pete Candler: Yeah. Yeah. Really the Emmett Till story has become so central to this book and to my life. Emmett Till, it's this strange paradox, and I think indicative of so much of American memory, particularly white memory. What happened to Emmett Till in 1955 is an unspeakably horrible story.

Matt Peiken: So what did you want to bring to this? Where did you feel you could come in here with something fresh? 

Pete Candler: I think what struck me was that this was a case where history is not just something that happened in the past. It has everything to do with the stories we continue to tell about what we think happened in the past. And what got my attention was when John and I were near Glendora, Mississippi, in 2018, and driving across the Tallahatchie River, where his body was discovered.

And we see a sign, this big purple sign. It's like the Riversite. And it is riddled with bullet holes. And we pull over to look at this thing and this black man across the street at just one level ranch house is out on the front porch smoking cigarette and he comes over and starts telling us about a sign and Like how it gets shot up every now and then.

And that became one of those short films that I made from that summer. And I found again, like in Fargo, just this willingness. And it's not just a willingness. It was like an urgency, an eagerness to tell this story. And Terrell was his name, Terrell McAtee. And he started telling us about Emmett Till.

And it's right a mile down this road, this gravel road is where they found his body, two fishermen. And it just made me realize that this stuff is alive. Like it has an urgency to people in this corner of the earth that it doesn't have for people like me, you know, white people of wealth, private school, Buckhead. But this should be in everybody's understanding of this country. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, so what are you working on now that we can talk about? 

Pete Candler: Right now, the immediate future is the book tour. It's taking me throughout the South. There's a cool thing has been that this whole book project, "A Deeper South", it's built around road trips. So when we started planning a book tour, it settled into 12 stops in about three weeks across the South and it's exciting for me because I get to go to some of these places that I love and read, talk about them.

This is phase one and this kind of gets at what we're doing next is last fall, I guess we did a screening of some of the short films that came out of my trips.

So there's like some of those really short three to six minute ones. And it includes the Emmett Till one, it includes the Fargo one. And then some others that I've made mostly around the 2018, 2019 era that grew out of those trips. And I packaged them together as a series of seven short films.

We did, we screened them here at the Grail in Asheville last fall, which was so fun. It was so cool to just have people come watch my movies. It was amazing. And so in the fall when the academic year kicks back up, we're going to be doing some events like that that will include hybrid book reading, workshop, film screening type stuff, and book tour.

To me, the interesting thing about all this stuff is like being able to, and I think the sensibility that those little films grew out of was, and was attempted to capture was, the specificity of the experience of a particular place at a particular time that cannot be repeated, but because of the nature of the universe, the nature of the world we inhabit discloses truth indefinitely. And so being able to go do that all over again, it never gets old.