Episode 5 - Full Color

VOICE: We’re from North Carolina. But we’re the Eastern – Piedmont. 

ANDREWS: Oh, Piedmont. Love the Outer Banks. Gotta love the Outer Banks. So, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama. We’re looking for Appalachia. 

DIANA MAZZELLA: Nancy Andrews is wearing a gold and blue West Virginia University sweatshirt walking along a line of people at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. She’s finds a woman who is from Tennessee but is going to school in Indiana. Andrews gets her phone number for a future story. But today, she and graduate student Justin Hayhurst need to find Appalachians who have traveled from their states for the march and presidential inauguration the day before. 

ANDREWS: Hey, anybody from Appalachia? We’d name some of the states. “Hey, anybody from West Virginia? Ohio?” You know, somebody would be like, “No, I’m not from there. I’m from Virginia.” And I’m like “Where in Virginia?” and they’re like “Pulaski County.” And I’m like “Hey, I was right near there. I was just in Lebanon.” And he knew that I really was there. ’Cause it’s spelled like you would pronounce “Lebanon,” but it’s pronounced “Lebanin.” ’Cause I had just stayed there like the week before and it was freezing. It was like seven degrees. 

MAZZELLA: I’m Diana Mazzella, and this is Sparked, a podcast about the people who are changing Appalachia’s future. I talked with Nancy Andrews because she spent early 2017 photographing people across Appalachia for the WVU Reed College of Media news website 100 Days in Appalachia. Long before she was asking random people about their states of origin on the National Mall, Andrews was a staff photographer at The Washington Post and Chief of Innovation at the Detroit Free Press. In 1998, she was named White House Photographer of the Year. And while at the Detroit Free Press, her team won four Emmy Awards. Her most recent job was as Ogden Newspapers Visiting Professor in Media Innovation at WVU’s Reed College of Media. While there, she became involved in the 100 Days in Appalachia project, led by Reed College’s Media Innovation Center director Dana Coester. The team wanted to share Appalachia’s stories that are often less heard across the nation. When Andrews embarked on taking portraits for the project, she made a commitment. She would only take photos in color. Not in black and white. She made this decision after she led an independent-study class where students asked people what the word “Appalachia” conjured in their minds. 

ANDREWS: And people would say, “mountains” or “poverty” or “black and white photography.” They literally answered: “black and white photography.” And when you look at even modern documentation of the area, you will see a preponderance of black and white photography. It’s like photographers’ cameras come here and all the color is like just sucked out of them. And it’s just black and white. Is it part nostalgia? Is it part the texture, and the light, and the grittiness of black and white. Sometimes as a photographer you’re really attracted to that light and form and you want, you know color is distracting. But if a lot of the representation is in black and white, then that sort of signifies a different time. And if you even look at pictures that are from the area, you’ll still see pictures that are from literally the Depression era to represent the area. These pictures are 50 years old and they’re still representing the area. No matter how monochrome the situation looked, I kept it all in color, we’ve published it all in color. Appalachia is in full color. Blue skies. You know, it’s not all gray. Green trees or yellow trees depending on the season, or brown trees. 

MAZZELLA: Just like the change of seasons across the Appalachian Mountains, her subjects appeared in full color. One of the first images in her series of portraits “100 Days, 100 Voices” -- which appears on 100 Days in Appalachia -- was of a woman standing in front of a gray sky. She’s wearing an American flag headscarf. The portrait is of Sara Berzingi, an Iraqi Muslim West Virginian who attends West Virginia University. In the series there are children, grandparents, farmers, activists. They are black, white, Asian. Christian, Muslim, Jewish. Gay, straight. Some of them are not what most people picture when they think of the residents of Appalachia. And their stories are always nuanced. ANDREWS: We’re just so divided that photography can be a more open invitation to look at someone in their eyes and that picture and then talk to them. Talk to them through their words and you know read them and see what they’re thinking about. 

[Dulcimer music] 

MAZZELLA: Andrews devoted several portraits to people at work. There is a man who drives a truck that hauls drinking water. The women who make brooms. The man who made caskets before the Mississippi factory where he worked closed. And the woman who teaches children how to play the dulcimer. 

ANDREWS: I have a police officer from Harlan county, from Harlan City in Kentucky. I have a hotel owner in Ashland, Kentucky. Have just have different people, you know, a guy who changes locks. Why do you do this work? Why do you work? I like to ask the question why and understand why somebody does something or not. 

MAZZELLA: We followed Andrews and graduate student Justin Hayhurst to the Mister Bee potato chip factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Why did she choose a potato chip factory? 

ANDREWS: sometimes you just pick things because you’re like, “I love potato chips. I think it’d be just interesting to go to a potato chip factory.” You know, you just see things in your life. This is why, I mean it’s one of the reasons why diversity’s so important in journalism, that newsrooms are diverse and whatever because you get your story ideas from what you do. So, I’m at a fast food place or I’m at a gas station, I’m looking at the potato chip aisle and I see “Mr. Bee’s, West Virginia’s only potato chip” and so it’s like “Oh, well I like potato chips. Let me see these.” And so sometimes it’s just sort of fun. 

ANDREWS: So we’re photographing and interviewing people for a website, 100 Days in Appalachia. 

WORKER: Oh (laughter). 

ANDREWS: So, I’m Nancy Andrews. This is graduate student Justin Hayhurst. 

WORKER: It’s really easy...you’ve just got to know how the feel of the chips. Once you get to learning that...you’re doing good. You’ve just got to learn the speed of it. 

MAZZELLA: They spent hours at the factory, documenting all of the parts of the chip-making process starting with workers loading potatoes into the machinery that would peel, wash, slice, fry, salt and season the chips. Then it’s onto the packing room where chips are loaded into bags from snack size to family size and then packed into boxes. It was sour cream and onion day, which provided an overpowering and mouth-watering scent at the end of the conveyor belt. I wasn’t complaining. Andrews talked to the workers about their history at the company and about their tasks and how they felt about the work. 

ANDREWS: We talk about the economy, we talk about jobs and we talk about you know people need money to pay for their families but I think and this is in my homage to Studs Terkel, there’s more to work than simply earning a paycheck. Most people get some other type of pay out of that work whether it’s a camaraderie with their friends, or they feel like they’ve made the world a better place or they’ve made a person’s day better by making them a cup of coffee, which is whatever it might be. And so, that work some of that translates to self-worth, so I wanted to have some of that discussion of that. 

MAZZELLA: Her approach seems straightforward. At daily news outlets across the country, reporters and photographers are working in places like Mister Bee. But for too long, this aspect of Appalachia has not been seen. Everybody sees the parts we know: the health statistics, the jobs picture, the environmental challenges. Her travels also showed her the depth and breadth of the human experience in Appalachia. 
While journalists have to develop people skills to do their jobs, Andrews is particularly friendly, open and curious. When my co-producer Raymond Thompson Jr. and I sat down with her to find out about her work on 100 Days in Appalachia, she engaged in conversation and then took out her cell phone and asked to make our portraits. 

Andrews, who grew up on a farm in Caroline County, Virginia, makes you feel like you’re important and the conversation is meaningful. It’s a good skill to have when talking, as she did, with high school kids of differing political views who went with their marching band to perform at the presidential inauguration. When she photographed people at a gay pride parade. And when she, unexpectedly, was asked to speak at a Tennessee rally held in support of President Donald Trump. So she explained the project. She wanted to know more about them. They wanted to know more about her. 
Andrews is aware of bad experiences that people have had in small towns when someone come in and wants to portray their lives, and the end result is made up of just the bad parts. You’ve read those stories. They feel like they’re saying that -- these people -- they’re too different from us. She described the time she visited the Pentecostal church where Martin West is pastor in McDowell County. 

ANDREWS: You go to their church, and it feels recently renovated. It’s got beautiful polished wooden floors. You could eat off the floor in this church. It is immaculate. And it’s like a regular church service and such. And photographing the different people there. And afterwards, this older woman comes up to me, she’s like, very timidly and she’s like, “Please be kind to us.” To tell her story, you know accurately and fairly, she felt the other depictions had been unfair. Like you know, please be kind really is translation to “Please don’t make fun of us.” Which is what happens sometimes in photography. It’s not exclusive to Appalachia. I mean it happens in other communities. Look at how we’ve depicted African American communities, or look at how we’ve depicted entire continents or look at how we’ve depicted different issues. 

MAZZELLA: So being able to give time and attention to people leads to a better outcome for the work and everyone involved. 

ANDREWS: I feel like that I am very much in the moment when I am there in your home, you have my complete attention. And you are sharing you know intimate details with me, you know like I’m there in the office visit and you’re talking about your health with the health care worker and I’m right there and you’re inviting me in, and I’m spending that time to listen to it and record it accurately. 

MAZZELLA: On a trip to Lynch, Kentucky, a town of fewer than 700 people, she photographed Greater Mt. Sinai Baptist Church. She met the congregation and worked inside the church and then went to get shots of the outside of the building. She parked her car and started walking to a good vantage point when a woman from the church drove up. Andrews realized her car was blocking the way and said she would move it.

ANDREWS: Sometimes people chase away photographers from these Appalachian towns because they’re like, “No, you will not photograph us in this way.” And she was just so sweet like “No, no, no. You’re doing your job. That’s okay. You know, I can wait.” I had three people, different people from the church say, “Where are you driving tonight? Do you need a place to stay?” I had three different people offer me places in their house where they really meant it. This group, when they realized I was leaving, they had a little pray circle for me to send me on my way. You know, and so it’s just like, there can be all of those little moments. 

MAZZELLA: Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. A big thank you to Nancy Andrews for letting us follow her as she worked and for the recordings of the women’s march and dulcimer music. And thanks to Mister Bee for letting us record in their factory. 

You can see Nancy’s work over the past year at 100daysinappalachia.com. It’s an incredible website that covers issues from energy to politics to culture. 100 Days in Appalachia is produced by the Reed College of Media Innovation Center in collaboration with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and The Daily Yonder of the Center for Rural Strategies. 

If you’re interested in seeing more alternative images of Appalachia, there’s a photo collective called Looking at Appalachia that you might check out at lookingatappalachia.org. It was started by photographer Roger May, who is also a contributing photographer at 100 Days in Appalachia. 

This is our last episode of this season. But we’ll be back with more episodes in the spring. To get a notification of when our new season is out, subscribe to our emails by signing up at wvumag.wvu.edu/sparked or by subscribing to our feed on SoundCloud, iTunes or Stitcher. 

And don’t forget to tell us what you think of the podcast by sending us an e-mail. We really want your feedback to make next season even better. 

Sparked is a production of West Virginia University, located in Morgantown, West Virginia.