Paul Kwilecki, 2009. Cell phone photograph by Tom Rankin.

Paul Kwilecki, born in 1928 in Bainbridge, Georgia, died in his hometown in early December 2009. Kwilecki had been associated with the Center for Documentary Studies and Duke University since the late 1970s; the Paul Kwilecki Collection was one of first and most prominent collections to be acquired by the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library’s Archive of Documentary Arts.

Perhaps the most important late-twentieth-century photographer you’ve heard little to nothing about, Kwilecki spent most of his days in his hometown and county, schooling himself by carefully studying contemporary photography and corresponding with a range of artists and photographers, most notably and regularly David Vestal. In 1981 he published Understandings (University of North Carolina Press), which was edited by Alex Harris.

Kwilecki set out to photograph his home in Decatur County, Georgia, and did so for over forty years. He often would say that his hometown was “a place that some say has no meaning.” But like William Faulkner, who stayed home to create his remarkable body of literature, Kwilecki had a different vision. “The task is complicated,” he said at a lecture at Duke in 2001. “I am one man, one mind, one pair of eyes trying to distinguish what is significant in an entire community.” He went about this work with a deep honesty, following his own instincts, his own point of view. “I rearrange the sacred furniture,” he said. “Because my brain, not my camera, is my instrument, beauty isn’t enough.”

Paul Kwilecki was a dear friend of the Center for Documentary Studies, someone who will forever provide an example of in-depth documentary work about one place through time. “I photograph subjects who are, to me, vivid and substantial,” he once said. “I leave everything else alone.”

—Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies