Imaging Literary Ireland

Published 9:15 am Wednesday, October 16, 2024

How does one go about taking photographs to illustrate the work of a writer?

John Lawrence, LaGrange College professor emeritus of art and design, offers some insights when he shares the photos he took for the book “The Road to Dungannon, Journeys in Literary Ireland” by Michael Pearson and discusses the process of capturing the spirit behind the text.

The program, ”Imaging Literary Ireland,” is at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, at LaGrange Memorial Library at 115 Alford St. It is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by Friends of the Library, a volunteer group that supports the library and its programs.

”For the past 40 years I have traveled to document places where writers lived and worked,” Lawrence said. ”My hope is to express visually in photographs the spirit and the nuances of descriptions in their poems and books. I have found just the opposite of what the old adage indicates:  ‘a picture is worth thousand words.’ I would need a lot more images to even begin to express what in a 10-line poem WB Yeats has written. My hope is that my photographs might inspire and prompt the viewer that in reading their poems and books is a worthwhile endeavor.”

A display of some of the photos from the book is on display at the library.

Lawrence began working at LaGrange College in 1970 after earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Atlanta College of Art and a master of fine arts degree from Tulane University.

When he joined the faculty at LaGrange, he was part of a two-person department, teaching drawing, painting, sculpture, art history and his specialty, photography. He later became director of the college’s Lamar Dodd Art Center, establishing one of the largest college museum collections of 20th century photography in the Southeast.

Lawrence also served as visual arts director for the Atlanta Arts Festival and was artist-in-residence in Cortona, Italy, with the University of Georgia. He taught photography in Cortona three other times and was a guest professor in Normandy, France, with the State University of West Georgia.

Lawrence’s photographs have been published in numerous journals and publications, including The Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Reader’s Digest.

He published a book of photographs of Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner. He published a book of photography on the architecture of Troup County, and the book ”Walls of Light” features Lawrence’s photographs of the work of Walter Anderson.

Even after retiring from the college in 2019, he has not stopped working. Lawrence continues to take on photography projects throughout the United States and the world.

“I’m always looking for new subject matter,” he said.

In his program at the library, Lawrence said he ”will attempt to explain how I went about photographing for the book by Michael Pearson, ‘The Road to Dungannon, Journeys In Literary Ireland.’ ”

Chasing after a family secret — a curious silence surrounding a long-lost ancestor — led Pearson on a pilgrimage through the landscape, history and literature of Ireland. His journey of self-discovery, flavored by poems, stories, lore and legend, reflects his idea that literature may be the key that explains the past and reveals the present.

Serving as part memoir and part journalistic chronicle, this work offers a unique look at how memory, literature and travel shape one’s definition of oneself. Also serving as a love letter to Ireland with chapters on native born authors such as James Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Seamus Heaney and more, this book explores the deeper influences of what makes a man a writer, scholar, adventurer, husband and father.

Pearson is the author of hundreds of essays, a novel and seven works of nonfiction. He taught at Auburn University, LaGrange College and for 32 years at Old Dominion University in Virginia. He is a full-time writer, working on both nonfiction and fiction projects.