It's late October, and about a dozen Nashvillians have gathered to plan a tribute to Flannery O'Connor. Photographer Jack Spencer has mostly remained quiet. When the topic turns to the upcoming election, he tells about a recent trip to his hometown of Kosciusko, Miss. In an exaggerated Southern accent, he shares a relative's assessment of Barack Obama: "Ya know, Jack, down here we think he's the anti-Christ."
The other guests crack up.
Spencer's terseness might seem gruff if you didn't know him. He has a low threshold for bullshit, his own or anyone else's. Growing up in the South—where learning to feign sincerity is an art form—must have been a challenge. Perhaps he's just following the suggestion of writer Edward Abbey, whom he quotes in an artist statement: "All artists should have their lips sewn shut."
Or perhaps he prefers to let his pictures tell the story. A prolific fine art photographer who's had over 80 solo shows and exhibited in just about every major American city, Spencer creates images both stark and lush, though nearly all share a haunting mysticism, a sense that each moment holds secrets far beyond what our narrow minds typically perceive.
Spencer's first body of work, Native Soil, mined the back roads of the Deep South, capturing pictures of old blues musicians, regular folks and backcountry landscapes. Subsequent projects such as Apariciones, This Land and Flores have expanded Spencer's palette, but a couple of threads run throughout—an eerie, inscrutable beauty and an infatuation with life on the margins. Like his late friend, photographer Ruth Bernhard—whom he eulogizes on his website—he strives to find life endlessly fascinating.
Spencer has no aversion to manipulating his work in the darkroom. "I think that whatever is recorded on the film plane is merely a jumping-off point," he writes on his site. After all, as he quotes Edward Steichen, "a photograph is a lie from start to finish."
But for one collection, The Lost Boys, Spencer eschewed his usual darkroom wizardry. The subjects were young men from the Lost Boys of Sudan—the throngs of Sudanese refugees who were driven from their homes by civil war. Ironically, the photos Spencer altered the least wound up altering him the most.
"I found out some of them had moved to Nashville," Spencer says, "so I got in touch with a few of them and started making portraits of them, and I guess I photographed 20 or 30 of them and I just fell in love with them. They're just wonderful guys."
Not long after, one of the Lost Boys, Pel Gai, was stabbed to death at a Nashville nightclub. "After that there was no money to bury him," Spencer explains, "so they came to me...and I took up a collection among friends of mine and we buried him, and then I realized how much help these guys needed, so we started the Lost Boys Foundation of Nashville. That was over five years ago, and we opened the center a couple of years ago, and I guess the rest is history."
And whatever became of the Obama-fearing relative? "She sent me an email the other day, and said, 'Boy, I sure hope our new president can do everything that he wants to do. He is so good.' I was like, 'What the fuck happened here?' " Life really is endlessly fascinating.
Photographed at his studio by Eric England with assistance from Sinclair Kelly
