Visitors to Old Church Gallery’s current photography exhibit, Kindly Mirrors – The Photography of Richard “Dick” Shank and Gertrue Vest Shank, may come away feeling that they have just enjoyed a visit with neighbors from a century ago, or family they wish they could claim. The exhibit, which is open Fridays 2:00PM-5:00PM and Saturdays 10:00AM-1:00PM through mid-December, features thirty prints of images taken between 1912 and 1917.
Throughout their long and productive lives, Gertrue Iva Vest Shank (1893-1989) and Richard Miles “Dick” Shank, Sr. (1886-1980) made various creations of fabric, yarn, and thread. They also did work with wood, bricks, and mortar for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. A profile piece by Kathleen Curtis Wilson called, “Textile Art from Southern Appalachia: The Quiet Work of Women.” states that Gertrue Shank “loved all the handcraft skills associated with a twentieth-century homemaker. Never idle, Gertrue gratified her artistic nature by weaving, quilting, knitting, and doing fine crochet work”. One of her woven coverlets is pictured in the book cited above; the Old Church Gallery owns another. Dick Shank “built furniture, bridges, houses, and barns,” and occasionally churches and commercial buildings, many of them still in use, both in and outside Floyd County.
Many of the Shank’s descendants will fondly remember Gertrue’s love of fabrics and quilting, as well as Dick’s expertise in woodworking and carpentry. Always ready to pick up new skills, the Shanks were creatively active in more than one way. Not only are they remembered for their decorative, practical creations, but they also found time to participate in the new hobby of photography. In 1910, photography was growing in popularity in big cities but was uncommon in rural America. The Shanks managed to perfect their new hobby, quickly adding photography to their skillset.
While they must have collaborated almost daily on farm chores unless Dick was working away from home, most of their creative work was done individually. The collection of negatives from which the photographs on display at the Old Church Gallery were selected represents an important exception. Gertrue had been given a camera by her brother Cleophas before she married Dick in 1913, and in addition to taking pictures, she was a willing and photogenic subject in individual and group photos. Apparently more comfortable behind the camera, Dick appears in fewer of the photographs.
Commercial and amateur photographs of the early 1900s typically featured unsmiling groups and individuals posed in their finest clothes. Using heavy, tripod-mounted glass-plate and sheet-film cameras, the traveling “picture men” who took most Floyd County photographs of that era arranged their subjects in front of painted canvas backdrops at community gatherings, private homes, schools, and general stores. Thanks, in part, to the fact that their hand-held camera, probably a Kodak “Brownie,” was lighter and easier to use, the Shanks’ photographs are much less formal, with subjects laughing, sitting on rocky ledges or in trees, even working with backs turned to the camera. Other images record baptisms, picnics, and family members relaxing on their front porches. Farm life is documented with weed-free rows of corn stretching across hillsides, ducklings paddling in a stream, and lambs being bottle-fed.
Whatever the setting or subject, the composition of each picture reflects what the Old Church Gallary’s Catherine Pauley calls “an artist’s eye.” Color photography was still decades in the future, but the Shanks’ black and white photographs reflect the same senses of contrast, balance, proportion, perspective, and pattern that made Gertrue’s quilts and coverlets so attractive. Its also what made Dick’s buildings so pleasing to their occupants and to passersby, then and now.
With any luck, the utility and beauty of Gertrue’s woven coverlets and the sturdy dignity of Dick’s houses will be seen and felt firsthand by viewers and visitors for at least another century. But the moments captured in their photographs are gone for good, as they were only seconds after the camera shutter clicked. Fortunately, the Shanks, like writers and visual artists of every place and time, knew this all too well. And so, like a character in Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “A Guide to Berlin,” they made it their business “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around [them] the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right…”. As they must have foreseen more than a century ago, the everyday lives of Dick and Gertrue Shank and their families and neighbors have been documented as anything but plain, they are thus well worth the time it takes to visit.
The Old Church Gallery is a cultural arts museum located at 110 Wilson Street in downtown Floyd, Virginia. Gallery collections and oral history archives focus on the creative efforts of the people who have lived here over time, with displays ranging from prehistoric stone tools to nineteen century baskets to early Floyd County recording artists to contemporary folk art.
With plenty of parking and access off the town’s Heritage Walking Trail, a visit to Old Church Gallery will fit snugly into a Floyd weekend. Admission is free. Kindly Mirrors – The Photography of Richard “Dick” Shank and Gertrue Vest Shank closes on December 16, 2023. Visit on Friday afternoons 2:00 to 5:00 and on Saturdays 10:00 to 1:00. To view virtual exhibits, learn about hundreds more permanent collection pieces, and experience our signature oral history programs, check out the Old Church Gallery website at www.OldChurchGallery.org.
Old Church Gallery • www.OldChurchGallery.org
110 Wilson Street SE, Floyd, VA • 540-745-2979