Bruce Roberts is a prize-winning photographer who began his prize-winning photo life in the middle ’50s.
I was handed a copy of Roberts’ recently published book, “Just Yesterday in North Carolina.”
A friend asked if I would like to read Roberts’ second book, which was published last year. I got quickly into his second book and found that each page brought forth its own keen memories.
Roberts began his photo life in the darkroom of the Hamlet News-Messenger. This was his first job after graduating from college in New York City. He said that when the trains came through the area, his darkroom vibrated in rhythm with the train, rendering his prints out of focus. He had to find a more stable base for printing.
(I know about Hamlet and its trains. In 1942, I was playing American Legion baseball for Rowan County. That same train track ran just outside the Hamlet baseball fence in right field. It was not unusual for an ump to call time out while the trains rolled through.)
There is a certain mystique that hangs around Bruce Roberts’ pictures. Whether he is showing the raw and dramatic force of a wrecked ship or the peaceful nature of work boats at bay, for me, the feeling is there. Character in his pictures shows through.
Roberts divides his book into four geographic regions of North Carolina: the people and places of the Outer Banks, the East, the Piedmont and the mountains.
He has several pages about lighthouses — the saving of lighthouses, as well as historic structures.
He was lucky enough to have a chance to photograph Bodie Island Lighthouse just after a light snow fell and before brisk winds brought on swift melt.
He opens his section on the East with a picture of tobacco being strung on sticks. Then, it was hung in wooden barns for curing.
Roberts devotes two pages to Carbine Williams, one of the inventors behind the M1 carbine rifle. It shows one picture of Carbine with him up front and his old home in the background. It was taken the day before the house was moved to the Museum of History in Raleigh.
Beautiful color pictures on two pages show workers hoeing in cotton fields and another life-sized shot of a worker at a tobacco warehouse.
Tobacco, however, was the golden weed, and Roberts uses his mind and his camera to tell the story, a story that goes on even today.
The Piedmont section opens with shots of Charlotte’s uptown and then eases off toward the west, where America’s first gold rush took place.
And there, on page 73, is what I had been looking for: a full-page color picture of the Fourth of July parade in my hometown of Faith. It is a great shot of a marching band with the downtown rooftops swagging heavy with observers, some of the faces I recognize.
The mountains section opens with a page on the left showing a red-clad daughter of the Robertses dwarfed by huge trees, and on the right page, a splendid shot of Lake Lure.
“Just Yesterday in North Carolina.” Second edition.
Well worth the trip.
Bill Williams is a retired editor of The Gaston Gazette in Gastonia, where his “Bill’s World” column is published weekly.