An Eye for the Essential :...

“It must have been 1975 or 1976 when I first set foot in the Pines,” Birney Imes writes in the introduction to his collection of photographs of a Mississippi Delta roadhouse. “I had just begun photographing seriously and would spend hours driving back roads looking for a site or a situation to photograph. It didn’t take long to stumble upon the place--the ‘Eppie’s Eats’ sign out front, the rusting cars, the hedge in the parking lot dividing the White Side and the Black Side, and the stuff--it was everywhere inside and out: coin scales, pinball machines, jukeboxes, lawn mowers, old campaign posters, newspapers, guns, cigar boxes, and beer signs. It was overwhelming, and it was irresistible.”

In Imes’ previous photo collection, “Juke Joints,” as well as in this new book, “Whispering Pines,” one sees an emerging documentary eye that is both dispassionate and intimate. Very few photographers get close enough to their subjects to avoid a kind of posed, unnatural response from people.

It’s not a question of invisibility; good photographers are very much present in their point of view, their selective, editorial eye, their basic visceral response to what’s in front of them. Imes is fond of the mundane weirdness of peoples’ lives, of what they collect and surround themselves with, of the accidental, unedited confusion of things that make up the uniqueness of place. Like William Eggleston, he has a strong sense of the South and its particular characteristics that penetrates--even punctures--the canonized cliches of Southern culture.

Another Mississippian and brilliant observer of everyday life in the South, Eudora Welty, traveled throughout the state in the 1930s, photographing people at home, on the street, at work or at political gatherings with an ease and acceptance that make her pictures sublime, natural, deeply revealing and unencumbered by artifice, attitude or the oppression of artistic intent. In a sense, they are about observing. Imes shares that quality of interest and pride in life in the Delta.

What one sees in his pictures are encyclopedic cultural moments: Against a backdrop of clutter, Whispering Pines proprietor Blume Triplett, rarely without a cigar, presides over Delta residents eating, drinking, dancing or just sitting around. The Whispering Pines images are both in color and black-and-white; the color work has the richness and precision of large-format photography. One’s eye wanders around on shelves and counter tops covered with jars of Magic Chef pigs’ feet, Now & Later bars, 45 r.p.m. records, endless cigar boxes, beer bottles, chicken-feet paperweights . . . but the stuff is a backdrop to the active life that makes Whispering Pines so fascinating: It’s the people, the undeniable sense that you are in a place unlike any other, that the aged, chicken-clutching, gun-waving white man in plaid is a benevolent clubhouse impresario whose patrons, black and white, have a rich shared history.

It’s in the cigar boxes that the history is detailed. Blume Triplett saves things; Birney Imes records the past without disturbing the comfortable incongruity of the boxes. They are photographed top-open and undisturbed, like archeological finds before the numbering and cataloguing has begun. One of my favorites has a black-and-white snapshot of a girl, under it a jukebox flipper, a boxed Hawaiian Wriggler fishing lure, some pipe cleaners, wire and a turntable stylus; another has five spent bullet shells, four peach pits, a door latch and two Gladys Knight jukebox labels. “Made in Florida. Havana Blend” serves as a kind of legend on the inner label of the cigar boxes. Not all of them are so random; one box holds a neat stack of papers, the top piece a news clipping headlined “Singer Charged in Mississippi--Negro Rock and Roll Star Denies He Asked for Date From Girl.”

But the best warning that Whispering Pines existed on its own, protected by Blume Triplett from the world outside is in one of Imes’ best portraits in the book. It’s Blume on New Year’s Eve, 1988, standing in front of the neon-lit roadhouse, a towel with swans over his shoulders, walking stick in one hand and pistol pointed into the night sky in his other hand. No one could ever imagine the photographer saying: “Hold it a minute, a little to the left, please, let me fix the light. . . .” It is that quality of participation that separates Birney Imes from a long line of picture-takers who, even if they are at the right place at the right time, fail to become part of the world they are visiting.

A second volume of Imes’ photographs, “Partial to Home”--an all black-and-white collection--more closely aligns Imes with an array of late 20th-Century photographers whose formalism resides in the subject rather than in composition, where moment dictates frame in some cases and content certainly overrides the desire for neatness or balance in every picture.

The girl behind the Coca-Cola counter in “Man with Mouthless Fish” throws an eerie imbalance into an already unusual image of two men in a store, one with an uneven-eyed stare and the dried fish in hand, held somewhat awkwardly. Then there is the photo in which a half-out-of-frame arm has “The Chickenman’s Dog” firmly by the tail in the back of a pickup truck.

But the majority of images are hardly carnival-like or bizarre. Imes has a comforting feel for portraits, and the ones included here have a close, unobtrusive feel to them, as if the subjects, fully-aware of the camera’s presence, didn’t mind being watched but didn’t feel like posing, either. “The Girl on Catfish Alley” on the cover is typical of his pictures: unromanticized, honest and strong. One can immediately understand that his work is beyond only regional significance (“Partial to Home” is published as part of the Smithsonian’s series, Photographers at Work), and that it is through a unique place and culture that we learn about ourselves, when the eye is paying attention.