Bruce Jackson Being There: Sprott Country Store

Throughout the run of Being There: Bruce Jackson Photographs 1962-2010, the artist is sharing some of the stories behind his photographs.Being There is on view until June 16, 2013. The catalog accompanying the exhibition is available at The Museum Store at the Burchfield Penney.

In 1998, I curated an exhibit at the UB Art Gallery of photographs Walker Evans had taken when he worked for the FSA Photography Project in the mid-1930s. In preparation for the show, Diane Christian and I visited a number of the places Evans had photographed, particularly in Mississippi and Alabama. Evans had taken several photos of a grocery store/post office in Sprott, Alabama. When we got there, we found it was still a grocery store, but no longer a post office, and the second floor in Evans's photos had long ago been lost to a fire. Some of Evans's photos of the store are in the FSA collection at the Library of Congress; others are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's probably the best-known rural grocery store of the 20th century, so Diane took a photo of what it looked like in the summer of 1997 and I took a picture of her doing it, kneeling just about where Walker would have set up his tripod.

-Bruce Jackson