Where civilization is just a faint memory

At the absolute pit of the Great Depression during the summer of 1932, a cub photographer for the Ft. Worth Telegram saved his money and packed up cameras, film and developing fluid. He bought matching embroidered cruise ship-style uniforms and caps and convinced two friends to be first mates on an exploration up and down the Gulf Coast. They thought of everything—even bologna sandwiches.

They were ready for Louisiana. Louisiana may not have been ready for them.

Before there was William Eggleston or C.C. Lockwood, the Deep South was Fonville Winans’ to capture, and a new book, Cruise of the Pintail, lovingly publishes Winans’ personal journal and photographs from his first wide-eyed voyage through our state. Buoyed by the escapist spirit of adventure pronounced by great heroes of the age, like Buck Rogers and Tarzan, Winans set out to document in photographs and 16mm film the uniquely character-rich inhabitants and landscapes of south Louisiana. The budding photographer had first spent time here a year earlier as a carpenter working on the Bayou Ramos bridge his civil engineer father was overseeing. Near Morgan City he purchased a leaking, rudderless boat called the Pintail for $25 and promised to return the following summer to travel the waterways and wilds of the Bayou State.

Winans was just 21 at the time and smack in the middle of that magic hour between the sunshine of youth and the coming dusk of adulthood when responsibility still seems distant and dreamers dream their dreams.

But return he did, and his journey is presented and preserved by the Winans family and LSU Press. Pintail contains far more than liner notes and minutiae for photographers or history teachers. These are evocative tales of an unpredictable voyage—recollections from a lanky rogue and creative genius with sharp Errol Flynn features and a thin, romantically rakish mustache.

“Dad was definitely an adventure-seeker,” says Fonville Winans’ son, Robert Winans. “He had this amazing attitude of taking life head-on.”

Robert Winans says reading through the journals of a 21-year-old Fonville provided a keener insight into his father’s character than even growing up in his own household.

“I was amazed at his style of writing at that young age,” he says. “We didn’t change a word of it, even the misspellings.”

From illicit oyster-diving in private beds, to photographing the muddy cutthroat throngs of New Orleans’ French Market, to blowing on his saxophone to get out of doing the dishes, many passages read like excerpts from a Joseph Conrad or Jack London novel.

“I sat up, tense and listening,” Winans writes of Aug. 8, 1932. “The natives rushed from their huts on the bayou side…. I was peering intently, watching the stolid group mill about in the shafts of moonlight that penetrated the jungle’s canopy, expecting any moment to hear the roar of the gun and a shout that an alligator had been bagged.”

Pre-dating the Beat generation by more than a decade, Pintail feels like a forebear of Jack Kerouak’s On the Road, revealing Winans as a similarly energetic and lyrical protagonist. The inspiring photographer ends this narrative—and his journal, for he never kept one again—by revealing he has enrolled at LSU, where he would soon meet his future wife Helen and later, establish a photography studio in Baton Rouge. In the same breath he confesses that he’ll always long for the excitement of the unknown.

“I strangely suspect I shall become restless, dreaming of boats and adventure … where the humdrum of civilization is just a faint memory,” Winans muses. “This going to school is just a new adventure, the end of which I cannot fathom. Life is such a gamble, and I have nothing to lose.”

fonvillewinans.com