Sills captures southern family

The poorer people of the rural South repeatedly appear in literature and art as “hillbillie” and “redneck,” stereotypes without being looked at as a people with innate humanity.

However, in Vaughn Sills’ exhibit, “One Family — an Extended Portrait in Photographs and Words,” the people in the photographs of rural Georgia speak to the viewer with wide, eerily staring eyes. Instead of looking down upon them, viewers connect with the people on the other side of the picture frame.

The exhibit now showing at the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, focuses on the Toole family, a tight-knit clan burdened by mental illness and tragedy, always on the absolute fringe of society. These people have been scorned by their community for generations, causing compassion in the viewer and sympathy for the tortured-looking people. They can smile for the camera, but their eyes tell of a painful past of death, divorce and hunger.

Sills began her 20-year correspondence with the Tooles one afternoon in the fall of 1979, when she left Athens, Georgia with a load of camera equipment and a tape recorder. She came upon a settlement of simple framed houses on a country road near a town that “called” to her. She parked her truck and entered the house unannounced. Since then, she has taken thousands of photographs of the family, documenting their everyday life in trailer parks and condemned houses through many generations.

The most candid of the black and white pictures is the print of Grandfather Joel sitting on an old sofa on the porch with a beer, while his granddaughters chase a toy car. The family knows how people view them, yet they still can look at the camera as honest, hardworking people with no preparation whatsoever.

The exhibit also showcases interviews with the family throughout the years, correspondence and poetry by the daughter Tina Toole Truelove. While the poetry seems clichéd, it is still endearing when she says things such as, “I think if I could write songs, or if our family could sing, I’d be rich … A big, close family doesn’t come along every day.”

While the photographs and poetry are touching portraits of a strong, hard-working family toughing it out in the South, the exhibit does not possess much holding power. After seeing half the photographs, they all begin to look similar. Every picture is taken either on the porch or in the house in the same positions, making the viewing tedious at some points. Sills does succeed in capturing the souls and truths of the family on her black and white film, making it a refreshing look at the face of the American South.