[bb_scrollmagic_scene id=”149697″]
[bb_scrollmagic_scene id=”149697″]
[bb_scrollmagic_scene id=”149703″]
What Hudson and his friends, Gooch and Birney Imes, both professional photographers, didn’t realize was that it would take them and later two other friends 30 years of relentless determination to preserve and curate a photobiography of their hometown of Columbus, called Possum Town by the locals. The Possum Boys, as they called themselves, eventually found the photos a home at Carolina’s Wilson Library as part of the Southern Historical Collection.
About 190 of the photos appear in Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble and Resilience in the American South, published in January by the University of North Carolina Press in partnership with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. An accompanying traveling exhibit, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, opened in Columbus in February.
“This is a story about a white photographer working in a racially segregated time in the American South who unflinchingly recorded a kaleidoscopic range of life in a community that reflects the life of our country at that time,” said Hudson, Possum Town’s author. “That’s what I wanted to show in the book and exhibit, this range that includes the sublime, the sacred, the tragic, the shocking, the horrific and the uplifting.”
Photography addict
O.N. Pruitt was born on a farm in southern Mississippi in 1891. By 19 he was married, and, just as today’s parents do with their cell phones, he obsessively snapped pictures of his children with his bulky Kodak Brownie 122, its accordion-style lens unfolding from a leather-covered box. In his early 20s, while working in his uncle’s mercantile store, he developed a side hustle taking his Brownie into the surrounding countryside to photograph timberland to show out-of-state lumber companies.
Pruitt’s uncle quickly tired of the acidic stench of the chemicals in the makeshift darkroom Pruitt had set up in the stockroom. By 1915 Pruitt had left the store and become a full-time photographer. He traveled 500 miles north to spend a year at the Illinois College of Photography, then returned to Mississippi, eventually buying out Columbus’ existing photographer, Henry Hoffmeister.
“He was a photography addict,” Hudson said. Thomas Caldwell, Pruitt’s grandson, told Hudson in a 2001 interview that his grandfather “didn’t care about much of anything other than photography … and going fishing.” Pruitt’s wife, Lena, managed the business.
When the traveling exhibit opened in Columbus in February, a local collector showed Hudson a dog-eared notebook with “Mrs. O.N. Pruitt, MSCW Class ’58” scrawled on the cover. Inside, in Lena Pruitt’s handwriting, are the names and addresses of students in a class photo from the Mississippi State College for Women, the first public women’s college in the country. Pruitt — using one of the large-format cameras designed so that photographers could sell copies to everyone in a group photo — charged $2.50 per print, about $24 in today’s dollars. He sold 72. There is no record of what he charged for other photos, although during the Depression he was known to barter for fish, chickens, eggs and produce.
What Hudson and his friends, Gooch and Birney Imes, both professional photographers, didn’t realize was that it would take them and later two other friends 30 years of relentless determination to preserve and curate a photobiography of their hometown of Columbus, called Possum Town by the locals. The Possum Boys, as they called themselves, eventually found the photos a home at Carolina’s Wilson Library as part of the Southern Historical Collection.
About 190 of the photos appear in Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble and Resilience in the American South, published in January by the University of North Carolina Press in partnership with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. An accompanying traveling exhibit, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, opened in Columbus in February.
“This is a story about a white photographer working in a racially segregated time in the American South who unflinchingly recorded a kaleidoscopic range of life in a community that reflects the life of our country at that time,” said Hudson, Possum Town’s author. “That’s what I wanted to show in the book and exhibit, this range that includes the sublime, the sacred, the tragic, the shocking, the horrific and the uplifting.”