Tamara Reynolds’ Melungeon pictures dignity in the margins of East Tennessee
Tamara Reynolds has spent her career embedding herself in communities that mainstream culture prefers to look away from. Her long-term project Southern Route examined identity, conflict and fading culture across the South, and her Guggenheim-winning photobook The Drake (Dewi Lewis, 2022) focused on the residents of a Murfreesboro Pike motel — portraits of people whose lives had been shaped by addiction, crime and abuse, viewed through Reynolds’ own personal history with addiction and recovery. That body of work formed a defining statement about marginalized communities. It’s a commitment she returns to in her latest work.
Melungeon, on view at Begonia Labs through June 26, finds Reynolds picturing Sneedville, Tenn., and the community historically identified as Melungeons — a mixed-race people whose ancestry braids African, Native American, and European lineages. Pushed to the margins of Appalachian life and treated as racially indeterminate, they found refuge in the ridges and hollows of East Tennessee under the weight of generations of suspicion and exclusion. Reynolds’ connection runs deeper than documentary interest. Sneedville is her husband’s home community, and the trust that intimacy affords is inseparable from how these pictures were made.
Reynolds uses portraiture, landscape, exterior shots and intimate interiors to capture day-to-day life in the Sneedville community. In the images at Begonia Labs a rainstorm drapes a river bridge in quiet mist and a curly-haired little girl struggles to hike up a sunny hillside. An antique church is carved in bright light and deep shadows, and a man with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed floats across the surface of a crystal clear stream. The look on his face is one part soul salvation, one part sweet relief from the Southern summer heat.
Reynolds’ works are untitled aside from simply noting their specific subjects. “Aibrianna at Clinch River” may be my favorite of all Reynolds’ photographs. It pictures the eponymous little girl underwater in the titular river, smiling up at the photographer through the rushing, rippling water. The refracting quality of the moving water distorts her face and body, but in a way that captures the strange magic of natural spaces on sun-drenched summer days. That distortion carries a darker resonance.
Distorted views of the Melungeon community cast them in a threatening light. Melungeons were landowners, and their racial ambiguity made their relative prosperity controversial at a time when black and white were strictly separated into distinct classes in the South. In another image designated “Aibrianna in Sunlight” the same girl stands at the edge of the river soaking wet from swimming and draped in a beach towel. She stares defiantly at every viewer touring the display at Begonia Labs.
Whether she’s capturing candid moments, framing just the right ratios of water and woods or snagging perfectly angled shadows in the afternoon sun, Reynolds is technically masterful and has a great intuition for elements that bring narrative depth to her compositions. But her real gift is for documenting outsiders without reducing them to their otherness or inserting herself into their stories. She’s like an old-school fly-on-the-wall documentarian who manages to be intimate with her subject yet objective and removed. The photos in Melungeon offer an insider perspective, but one into which Reynolds has been invited.