PORTRAITS IN BLACK AND WHITE: PHOTOS OF RURAL SOUTHERN ILLINOIS ELDERLY AT SOUTHEAST

"Bertha and Howard Prater, Prairie Du Rocher, Illinois, Nov. 21, 1994."

"Ted Moll," Prairie Du Rocher, Illinois, July 22, 1995."

It is a simple way of life that has been passed down from generation to generation. It is a life of chicken coops and backyard gardens, a life where women still wash clothes by hand rather than in a machine, a life lived close to the earth.

It is a life that Mark Rabung has captured in his exhibition, "Home and Yard: The Material Culture of the Rural Elderly Living Along the Mississippi River Valley in Southern Illinois," which will be featured beginning Dec. 1 in the Southeast Missouri State University Museum.

The exhibition, which will run through Jan. 9, features nearly 60 black-and-white photos of the people and the land shot by Rabung. Accompanying the photographs are 17 text panels with quotes from the people's oral histories. The text panels are matted and framed the same as the photos to give the words the same emphasis as the pictures.

"I'm not just looking at the visual image," Rabung said in a phone interview from his home in Akron, Ohio..

"I'm more interested in the context. Each piece is working with the others to tell a story -- a story of the agrarian way of life, a way of life that is rapidly disappearing."

Some pockets of society still cling tenaciously to that way of life, Rabung believes. He found such a pocket in the rural elderly of Southern Illinois.

For over four years, Rabung, who teaches at the University of Akron, visited over 40 elderly families in southern Illinois, taking photographs of them and their homes, listening and recording their stories. His only criteria in finding his subjects is that they were born in or before the depression and that they felt a kinship with the land.

One subject captured on film was a 92-year-old Prairie Du Rocher man who Rabung just called "Bud." The garden was so much a part of Bud's life that he could often be seen outside, a hoe in one hand, a cane in the other.

Rabung's interest in the rural way of life grew out of his desire to understand something of his own heritage. His greatgrandfather had been a farmer and his grandfather a small-time farmer. His father, however, turned his back on farming, choosing instead to go to college and into corporate America.

"That way of life was lost on me," he said.

The project, then, was a way he could discover his heritage and the foundations of his own values even as he discovered the values of those he photographed.

Even Rabung's choice of photographing only in black and white show his desire to capture the past as he draws on the fine arts traditions of the 30s and the 40s.

Rabung will travel to Cape Girardeau on Monday, Dec. 8, to deliver a 3 p.m. talk about his work in the University Museum. The talk will be followed by an opening reception from 4 - 6 p.m. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

Many of the families who are subjects of Rabung's photographs will be at the reception for people to meet and talk with. Rabung wouldn't have it any other way.

"I wouldn't have a project without these individuals. This has been very much a collaborative project," he said.

The exhibition has already been shown in Memphis, Tenn. and Evansville, Ind.