In the tobacco country of rural North Carolina, David M. Spear has photographed a family of plain-living people, and the beauty of his vision is startling. An old woman preparing to shampoo loosens her long, white hair; it floats, diaphanous, over a bowl of water. A man lying in bed gazes out a grimy window, his weathered, pensive face illuminated by sunlight.
These and other photographs comprise Spear’s intimate portrait of the Neugents, a family of small-scale tobacco farmers in Madison, North Carolina. Himself a native of Madison and neighbor to the Neugents, Spear began photographing them in 1987. He was fascinated by their resemblance to local farmers in the thirties and forties, when agribusiness and industrial development hadn’t yet replaced sharecropping and family farms. “During World War II,” he recalls, “each fall Madison filled up with people like the Neugents who had brought their tobacco to sell. The town came alive with medicine shows, mule-drawn wagons, and families milling about. These people survived on what they made from sharecropping tobacco and on what they were able to grow to eat. They were strong-willed and kept to themselves.”
The Neugents, too, seem closely bound to tradition, from the late Mamie Neugent — the family matriarch and a third-generation tobacco farmer — to her grandchildren who are still farming. They appear so insular that one wonders how Spear was able to produce such personal photographs. At first, he admits, he approached the Neugents as merely “objects to be photographed [in] the tradition of photojournalism.” Dissatisfied with the results, he realized family members would need more time before they’d open their lives to him. In all, Spear photographed the Neugents for more than five years, gradually winning their trust. Finally, he says, “I was no longer taking their images; they were giving them to me.”
Spear was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1992, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A collection of his photographs of the Neugent family — including most of those reproduced in this issue — appears in The Neugents: Close to Home (Jargon Society, 1993).
— Pamela Tarr Penick
The photographs from this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.
