The Picture Man was Paul Buchanan (ca. 1910-1987), an itinerant photographer who, on foot, on horseback, and by car, wandered four North Carolina mountain counties from 1920 until about 1951. He had stopped making pictures for more than thirty years when Ann Hawthorne, a photographer...
Buchanan worked during years when the mountains were still relatively isolated and when many outsider photographers tended to stereotype the people who lived there, posing them in homespun instead of their new store clothes, for instance. In Paul Buchanan's pictures, then, we...