ONE FAMILY
By Vaughn Sills. The University of Georgia Press, 192 pages, $30.

About a decade ago, the Politically-Correctsters called the Judæo-Christian establishment to task for defining people of non-Eurocentric cultures — Aborigines, Navajo, Samoans — as the “other.” The central fault cited was white culture’s tradition of analyzing the indigenous peoples it conquered, exploited, and displaced as a means of dismissing their values and customs as primitive and, by implication, expendable. Indigenous cultures, it was pointed out, had a right to be insulted.

In 1979, Simmons College teacher Vaughn Sills nervously approached some children playing in front of a broken-down shack somewhere near Athens, Georgia, and began photographing them. Her self-conscious intrusion led to a long-term relationship with the Tooles, a poverty-level family of what Northerners and Southerners alike call white trash. Over the course of 20 years, Sills revisited the Tooles, photographing them and tape-recording their commentaries on their own lives. The result is the just-published One Family and a touring exhibit of Sills’s extended-family portrait that’s now at Simmons’s Trustman Gallery through April 20.

Tedious as the task may be, it’s inevitable that someone — and it might as well be us — test Sills’s project for the sin of cultural chauvinism. Yes, she’s invaded these people’s lives and treated them as curiosities, making them subjects not just of photographs but of some amateur/documentary cultural study. Does her work judge the Tooles? Was she slumming? Or is this defensible documentary photography?

To understand why these questions are necessary, try turning the tables. How would you feel if some toothless guy in a plaid shirt and a John Deere baseball cap parked his pick-up in front of your house and announced he wanted to photograph your family? So the people back in Dogpatch could see how folks like you live. Stings a little, doesn’t it?

But justifiable or not — and when you see these photographs, you will ask — those are unfairly loaded questions. There’s an element of voyeurism in all documentary photography. That Sills’s project emerged at a time when we’re especially sensitive to the idea that all people deserve the respect of self-definition makes her an easy target. But the real issue is not whether Sills treated the Tooles as different (she did) but whether she treated them as equals.

As it turns out, Sills’s fault was in being too fair — taking a neutral observer’s stance and letting the Tooles tell their own story. Working under partial sponsorship by Polaroid, Sills shot much of her project on its Type 665 black-and-white film, which yields an instant negative as well as the usual instant positive. The negative quality is exquisite, but the process doesn’t lend itself to rapid-fire candid photography. So One Family is a protracted series of mostly posed informal portraits through which we follow the life stories of Toole matriarch Lois, her terminally ill husband, Joel, and their nine children, 17 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. Sills never actually photographed the events the Tooles discuss in their oral histories; the result is a body of work that’s nonjudgmental, self-defining, and respectful to a fault but lacks the clout and revelation of conventional documentary. PC or not, we long for outsider commentary; we want to know more about this family’s place in our wider culture — about their jobs, their education, the limits of their lives. But this book’s virtue lies elsewhere, in its ability to expose these so-called crackers as human — as people who confront life’s problems with strengths and purposes we can understand, if not necessarily share.

The portrait-upon-portrait motif can be monotonous — especially with shots of Lois, who despite, as we learn from the text, periodic episodes of depression and violence barely changes expression through the 20 years of Sills’s focus. Following the progress of the younger Tooles can be more enlightening. Lois and Joel’s youngest daughter, Tina, is first seen at age 10 posed with her mother; One Family takes her through two marriages and the birth of her daughter, Tasha (the subject of the book’s cover portrait). Tina also provides a submotif for the book through her verse. Sills notes with understandable but somewhat condescending astonishment: “In country music style, Tina had written true poetry.” And indeed, in contrast to the squalid lifestyle shown in the pictures, the self-awareness, not to mention the sheer literacy, of Tina’s folk poems suggests, to put it bluntly, that these people aren’t as dumb as they look.

In that, and in the subtle progression of clothing and surroundings away from poverty and neglect, Sills’s 20-year portrait reminds us that the Tooles’ marginal culture isn’t so far removed from the mainstream. The political inhibitions with which Sills so obviously wrestled make this book unconventionally challenging, but in the end One Family stands as a beautifully executed and sensitive cultural portrait that teaches us things we didn’t expect to learn.

The Trustman Gallery at Simmons College, 300 the Fenway, is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Call (617) 521-2268.

Issue Date: March 29-April 5, 2001