It was the poetry of Frank Stanford that first drew the photographer Matthew Genitempo to the Ozarks. “When you take the lost road . . . / You find lovers who’ve been listening / For the same roosters to sing / For twenty centuries,” Stanford, who inhabited the mountainous region for most of his adult life, writes in his poem “Circle of Lorca.” “When you get lost on the road / You run into the dead.”
In 2016, Genitempo was living in Austin, Texas. He’d spent time photographing people living off the grid in New Mexico, and started a project about a ghost town along the Mexican border, but it never quite jelled. Frustrated, and casting about for something new, he decided to trek out to the Piney Woods, a forest chain that extends from northeastern Texas to southern Arkansas, just south of the Ozarks. “I got this idea in my head that I could follow the woods and make my way there,” he said.
His resulting series, “Jasper,” which is collected in a volume from Twin Palms Publishers, is an idiosyncratic travelogue, combining elegiac black-and-white landscapes with portraits of the men and women he encountered as he wandered deep in the Ozark Mountains.
When he first arrived, he spent a few days aimlessly crisscrossing the landscape. As he clattered down yet another pocked, dusty road, he observed a young man slouched against his house, smoking a cigarette. Genitempo pulled over and stepped out of his car.
The man was named J.B., and as the two talked he mentioned an acquaintance who lived in a half-buried, abandoned school bus. To learn more, Genitempo would need to talk with a woman working at a gas station nearby, so he drove over and bought some peanuts. She drew him a map on the back of his receipt. The man in the half-buried bus—Steve—led him to another man, who told him about another, and on and on.
In one image, a figure perches on a white plastic bucket, pencil and paper in hand. The cavelike space around him is cluttered with bottles, clothes, and sheafs of paper that hang, batlike, from the ceiling and walls. This is Copper Heel, a former meteorologist who lives in a quasi-subterranean, hand-built structure under a rock, and earned his nickname after a copperhead snake bit him during his first couple of weeks in the wild.
Genitempo followed roughly sketched maps to find some of his subjects, at times hiking for hours through the woods to reach their dwellings. Relying on word of mouth and chance encounters, he returned to the region more than a dozen times in the following years, producing a quietly psychological portrait of the people who dwell in self-imposed exile in the Ozarks.
The people in these photographs are not complete recluses, Genitempo told me. Many offered him a drink or a place to stay. A few have phones. They’ve chosen to limit their access to society, not cut it off entirely. Genitempo also emphasized that “Jasper” is not a documentary project but, rather, a lyrical exploration of the impulses behind the life styles he observed in the Ozarks. When he returned home, and reread some of Stanford’s work, he discovered that he had unintentionally illustrated some lines from one of his poems, “Blue Yodel of the Desperado”:
As I was leaving I remembered
The handful of dirt I picked up
The cold ground you slept on
And when I got to where I was going
The place I came from
I needed a knife to clean my fingernails.
Sourse: newyorker.com
