Martin J. Dain

Martin J. Dain

Photographer Martin J. Dain was one of the few who photographed author  William Faulkner at Rowan Oak, the writer’s home in Oxford. A selection of those  images are compiled in a traveling exhibit, “Faulkner’s World: The Photographs  of Martin J. Dain,” on display at the Evelyn Gandy Cultural Center, 3rd floor Gulf Coast Library, Gulf Park campus through May 9.

The photographs of Martin Dain provide a unique journey into the world of William Faulkner. Taken between 1961 and 1963, Dain’s photographs portray Faulkner at home as well as provide a comprehensive look at the people and cultural traditions that inspired him.

On his first visit to Oxford in 1961, Dain made numerous photographs of the  town and the surrounding rural Lafayette County, the inspiration for the  author’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Dain returned in 1962 to photograph  Faulkner’s funeral and made additional images of Lafayette County.

The exhibition opened at the University of Mississippi in 1997 and traveled  for two years as part of the Faulkner Centennial Celebration. It had an encore  tour in 2007 in conjunction with the Mississippi Reads project administered  through the Mississippi Library Commission, and is once again available, this  time for libraries, museums, and cultural centers in Mississippi and surrounding  states.

“Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain” was curated and  produced by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Oxford.

This memorable collection of black-and-white photographs focuses on William Faulkner's homeland, which his great corpus of fiction transformed into Yoknapatawpha County. Martin J. Dain made them in Mississippi during the last two years of Faulkner's life (1961-62). They evoke the wonderful spirit and exactitude of the land and the people Faulkner wrote about. Most first appeared in Dain's Faulkner's County: Yoknapatawpha (1964), which has been out of print for many years and in high demand among Faulkner admirers everywhere. Faulkner's World, published now in celebration of Faulkner's centenary, includes several pictures that were not in Dain's earlier book. 

It was the photographer's reverence for the writings of the Nobel Prize-winning author that stimulated him to travel to Faulkner country with his camera. "All my life I had been reading Faulkner," he says, "and you mature along with your reading and discover this man has said and known everything that's worth knowing and saying in your entire life. 

In the introduction to Faulkner's World, Dain tells the photographer Tom Rankin of his relationship with Faulkner and his extensive travels in Mississippi as he took the photographs. 

For the acclaimed novelist Larry Brown, who lives in Faulkner's home town and who has written the foreword for Faulkner's World, Dain's photographs evoke Brown's own past-"another time in the place I still call home." Brown's world was the world of Faulkner, although he was only ten when Faulkner died. "Stepping back into the past," Brown writes, "is like entering a dream world that once was real but now is gone, the faces faded and dulled by time in the memory....You remember the old people you used to talk to and you wish you could talk to them one more time. You know how valuable that was now." 

To Brown, Dain's photographs "preserve old times and people in the best and most satisfying ways. They can never fade away now, cannot slide back into memory and be forgotten forever." 

In the nearly four decades since Dain made this rare photographic record of Yoknapatawpha, his images have become familiar icons. They have made the old, enduring landmarks of Faulkner country visible for all of us.

Copublished with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi. 

Martin J. Dain, a native of Massachusetts, lives in Carmel Valley, California. Tom Rankin, a professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, is the photographer and author of Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi).