Author: Maggie Lee Sayre, edited by Tom Rankin

Publisher/Date: University of Mississippi Press (1995, 1st printing)

Format/Condition: Softcover, 83 pages, Measures 9×9”

Description: Maggie Lee Sayre was born deaf near Paducah, Kentucky, in 1920. She lived fifty-one years of her life on a river houseboat as her family made a living by fishing throughout Kentucky and Tennessee. This collection of her photographs, accompanied by descriptive captions from Sayre, reveals a traditional river culture that is rooted in subsistence living.

Sayre’s first camera was a simple Kodak given to her sister in 1930, when Kodak, in celebration of its semicentennial, offered free cameras to children who became twelve in that year. Empowered by the camera, she was able to define and represent river life, her special sphere. Her black-and-white images of fish, family, friends, and riverways convey an astonishing, unique place.

“Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre” is how she chose to sign her name when Tom Rankin first met her. Her camera became her way of communicating her identity and of engaging in a dialogue with a hearing world for the first time. Her photographs convey her personal aesthetic, defined by her deafness, her environment, and her belief in collecting visual images of ordinary life.