PHOTOGRAPHY STUFF: Monica Showalter emails:

Just wanted to tell you how much I love your beautiful photos of Knoxville and the environs. That one of the café looked so fascinating, no fashion photographer could have done such an interesting job. It’s a historical record, too, I would love to see you put them all in a book, I’d buy the first copy.

I love the diners, the streets, the storefronts – you are chronicling something really fresh and marvelous to my west coast eyes and I love looking at those photos. I didn’t even think such a world existed – the stuff is 1950s-ish, and yet it is modern and kind of hip. Hope you keep the photos coming!

Well, thanks. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a book — it wouldn’t make much money, and it wouldn’t do anything for my academic career, but it would be fun. We’ll see. The photos I post here are to such a book as blogging is to writing a book: Ideas, and maybe usable bits here and there, but not anything like the finished product. I’d probably need a couple of hundred photos as good as my ten or twenty best right now. And, interestingly, a lot more people see the pics on the blog than would ever see them in a book. But I enjoy it. And yes, Knoxville is like that — like “Austin without the hype,” in one memorable turn of phrase.

I’ve gotten various other questions about photography. I’ll do a post on that later.