Maggie Lee Sayre

This slim book documents aspects of the life of a subsistence level family living on a houseboat in the rivers of Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1930s – 1960s. The family relied primarily on fishing with some help from the gardens they planted ashore. The lucid sixteen-page introduction by Tom Rankin describes the discovery of the photographs and provides a sensitive, insightful view of the life of the Maggie and her family.

‘Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre,’ as she refers to herself, was born deaf. The intervention of a concerned woman enabled Maggie and her older sister to attend a boarding school for the deaf. They spent nine month of each year at the school and returned to live with their family for the summer. However Maggie’s sister, always sickly, died in her early teens and after that Maggie continued school alone. After high school graduation she spent most of the rest of her life living amongst people who lacked the ability to communicate in sign language and who had a limited education with only basic writing skills.

The book includes 58 pages of black and white photographs taken from Maggie’s scrapbook of over 250 photographs. Many of the photos in the book are printed full page. The earlier photos were taken with a Kodak box camera that Maggie’s sister received as part of a Kodak promotion. Maggie inherited the camera after her sister’s death and began to document the life of her family. Later she purchased a Kodak Duraflex II camera when it became difficult to obtain film for the box cameras. She mailed the film to a drug store to be processed and printed.

The photographs are lacking in technical quality but they provide an intimate, affectionate look at Maggie’s life as her family and friends lived. Some social interactions are documented but other aspects of life—a wedding, the birth and rearing of children, deaths in the family—are missing. This is no doubt due inlarge part to the fact that Maggie never married. In fact, the photos do not even hint that Maggie ever had a romantic relationship. Instead, ‘Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre’ Photographs of a River Life,’ provides an interesting glimpse into the life of an honest, hard-working, independent, self-sufficient family.… (mehr)