Jean-Pierre Laffont’s best shot: Jimmy Carter’s neighbours in their one-room home in Plains, Georgia
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Version 0 of 1. When Jimmy Carter was elected President on 2 November 1976, he was called the peanut farmer, but nobody really knew who he was. So I decided to go to his hometown of Plains, in Georgia, to find out. I spent November and part of December there, photographing people who knew him, as well as aspects of life in the south. I was driving my little Renault 5, which stood out from all the pickup trucks, and the police quickly got to know me. I met Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, a really flamboyant character, and his brother Billy, who ran a gas station and spent all his time drinking beer and talking to the press. One day I drove past Miss Lillian’s nearest neighbours, who lived just 150ft from her house. I saw a woman hanging out a huge amount of washing and a man repairing an old car. They posed for a photograph and said to come back in the evening when the whole family would be home. That night, I spent about two hours with them taking pictures. The house was very small: it had just the one room you see here. Everybody in the picture was related and they all lived together. The mother is sitting on the left with two of her children; next to them is their grandmother in a wheelchair; the father is on the right; and I think a couple of the older boys were nephews. They all worked on local farms, the mother as a maid and the father as a mechanic, and the young ones were still at school. They were extremely poor with almost no income. The house had no running water but they did have a chicken that lived under it. As you can see, they didn’t have a single shelf or chest of drawers, because they didn’t have room. Instead, they put nails in the walls and hung their belongings off them in school or shopping bags. At night, the adults slept on sofas – there was another on the other side of the room – and they laid out blankets on the floor for the children. Winters were cold but the house stayed warm, thanks to the stove in the middle of the room. Almost every poor family I met in Georgia had one of these stoves. I came to realise that this was a fairly typical large southern family: they seemed calm and loving towards one another, and the area was strongly religious, with a real sense of community. The streets were so quiet on Sundays: everybody was at church. Miss Lillian’s house, where Jimmy grew up, was very humble. It was by no means a rich family’s house. Miss Lillian was a nurse and knew the poor, including the family in this picture. She was against segregation and was loved by black people, as was Carter. Nobody called her Mrs Carter, though; she was Miss Lillian because that was just the way in the south. When I was there, I didn’t see black and white people mix at all: they’d go to different churches, restaurants, gas stations and barber shops. It was all quite friendly, but it felt like segregation was still going on. CV Born: Algeria, 1935. Studied: School of Graphic Art, Vevey, Switzerland. Influences: Ernst Haas, Henri Cartier-Bresson. High point: “In 1979 and 80, I worked in 15 countries on a project about child labour.” Low point: “When the photo agency Gamma closed down.” Top tip: “Never show your portfolio to a picture editor without having a proposal for a follow-up project.” • Jean-Pierre Laffont’s Photographer’s Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990 is published by Glitterati Incorporated. |