PHOTO EXHIBITOR AIMS AT FREEZING PASSAGE OF TIME

Carl Lindgren's goal as a professional photographer, writer, historian and education consultant is to capture the passage of time, freezing it momentarily, preserving it for all time to come.

"I prefer to aim my camera when all breathing has ceased," Lindgren said of his work. "When time has ebbed and it is perpetually 3 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon."

Lindgren, an internationally recognized photographer, discussed his photographs of William Faulkner's native Mississippi when his exhibit opened Sunday in Southeast Missouri State University's Kent Library.

"There are no people in my photographs," Lindgren said. "I can show desolation and look for the neutrality you have without people in the foreground.

"In the absence of people, you can show the building which would normally be in the background of a family picture by itself, with no change; just as a moment in time," he said. "Yet, underneath the still photograph there exists a static feeling like something will soon take place."

Lindgren's travelling portfolio of 20 prints, entitled "Passing Shadows: Photographs of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha," is being sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies and will be displayed through April 30.

Originally from Virginia, Lindgren now makes his home in Courtland, Miss., and lectures on photography at the University of Mississippi. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Mississippi and has studied at the College of Preceptors in Essex, England.

He has been a professional photographer since 1976.

Lindgren's landscape photographs of Northern Mississippi, the setting of William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha, have been exhibited throughout the United States and in several foreign countries.

Lindgren admits that he is, in a sense, much like the author whose stories he brings to life.

"We are real homebodies," Lindgren said of he and his wife. "We usually stay within a 300-400-mile radius of our home."

Faulkner himself was a loner a homebody who left the family estate and made an effort to change the spelling of his last name.

"There was much resentment between Faulkner and his family," Lindgren said. "If one saw the other coming, they would cross the street and pass on the other side."

Lindgren has photographed the home of Faulkner, and the one which he defiantly left at an early age. When Faulkner's mother died, the family home was acquired by the University of Mississippi.

In his photographs, Linden works to immortalize the Mississippi countryside Faulkner made famous. Photographs of log houses, wooden fences, unkempt Magnolia trees, each representing the splendor and dying traditions of the Old South.

"Some scenes are suspended at mid-afternoon for decades while others burst back to life in a minute or two," Lindgren said of his work. "Doors are propped half-open; parking lots are empty. Smoke rises from an untended garbage can.

"This South has an indisputable timeless quality about it," he continued. "A vine-smothered barn, a brightly painted Volkswagon bus, a glistening-white courthouse or a bay mare flipping her tail occupy a single moment."

Lindgren preserves such fleeting moments for antiquity, dating and signing each one, putting the photograph in context of a time-line continuum.

"Languid Sunday afternoons give way to frantic weekday activity," Lindgren said. "Yesterday's barnyard turns into today's three-bedroom brick home and another moment is gone. Unless, of course, a camera is there to record it.

"My photographs are artistic and documentary of the South," he said.

One of photographs in the exhibit is that of a brightly painted Ford van, with colorful swirls, the silhouette of a beautiful woman and a tell-tale Highway 61 road sign emblazoned on the door.

"The `Oxford Magic Bus' depicts the blues (music) of Tennessee," Lindgren said. "Highway 61 leads to Blues Alley; the colors show the temperamental nature of the music it's a psychological message of a historical thing."

One of Lindgren's most moving photographs, "The Homestead," is of a dilapidated old home, windows broken out, yard overgrown in brambles, with an ancient, wood-paneled family car moored without wheels in the front lawn.

"When I first saw this house, I could picture children running around the yard, the family dressing up to go to church in the car, the vitality and life the home once fostered," he said. "But over time the disarray and decay set in.

"I took this photograph three weeks before they tore the house down."

Lindgren and his wife planned to head home to Mississippi after Sunday's showing of the collection. But they did not leave before imparting kind words on the people of Cape Girardeau.

"I've been everywhere I even lived in England for three years," Lindgren said. "But I have never encountered people as friendly and open as the people of Cape Girardeau have been to us."