About
a Girl

In my fifth year two pictures of evil arrived within months of each other. One was real. One was not. The fake one is the one that frightened me.

The real one came on a May afternoon in 1973, six members of one farm family dead in a trailer off River Road in Donalsonville. It was on my father's beat at The Albany Herald. It became the story of his career and then it became his book, Dead Man Coming. The man at the center of it was Carl Junior Isaacs — nineteen years old, five foot six, a hundred and thirty pounds. His brother Billy was fifteen.

My fifth year on earth I was introduced to murder, which did not bother me. The Exorcist did though. I could not recognize that monster. Robin Postell · Dead Man notes

Read it again. Not could not bear to look. Could not recognize. I had already been handed the true shape of the thing — skinny, hungry, teenage, ordinary, the kind of boy good country folks would have fed supper to if he had turned up before he started shooting. Then a movie came and told me monsters are marked. Grotesque. Legible. Announcing themselves in a child's ruined face.

I knew it was a lie, and the lie is what terrified me. Fifty years later I am still filing on it.

From seven on I spent hours of nearly every day in our home darkroom developing my own film and prints, standing in a chair to reach the trays. The cool dark of that inky interior was the most comfortable room I knew. Still is. It taught me the only thing about pictures worth knowing: darkness is the default, and light is a paintbrush painting life into reality, order out of chaos and back again.

We had a pool and even our own darkroom down in my daddy's home office, the walls lined with five iron Royal manual typewriters and Nikons strewn across the floor stacked high with newspapers, books and my drawings. "The Quintessential Sexiness of a Man's White Shirt" · joolyah.com · May 2020

Up until my early twenties I wrote incessantly, in journals, while I printed. And I learned how to hustle by watching my father: I sold photographs of my schoolmates to their secret admirers, for clothes and spending money. That is the whole business model, and I have not improved on it since.

My career broke into the national market with a gig for Black Belt covering UFC V — when it was far too controversial for anyone to believe it would survive. It became an inadvertent niche, and it shaped my career and my character in ways I did not see coming and would not trade.

International travel came out of those mixed martial arts connections and immediately whet my appetite for more of the same. Covering adventure races — the Eco-Challenge, the Marathon des Sables, the 4 Deserts series, the Jordan Cup, Subaru Primal Quest — kept me globetrotting, while I built hard editorial bonds with Penthouse, Razor, and other men's lifestyle and travel titles.

Investigative pieces, human-interest and character profiles, event coverage — those became my preferred literary form, with my own photography to illustrate them. I have always been a package deal, writer and photographer both, which is why I never licensed a frame until now.

I built bodies of work around subjects rather than hit-and-runs. Once was rarely enough. The topics I pitched were the ones I had a driving interest to immerse myself in until I got my fill. Some I never did. Others I had to, often with a bittersweet conviction to keep it professional — to remain, ultimately, a spectator.

My father eventually gained access to the four-man ringleader of the Baltimore fugitives who had so heinously intersected the lives of a family they never should have logically encountered. I came to know Carl Isaacs — nineteen at the time of the slayings — as my "pet murderer," until his execution in 2003, after thirty years on Georgia's death row.

A non-fiction memoir built on those interviews, Coming Clean, is a work in progress. So is the authorized reprint of my father's book. The monster that frightened me at five had a made-up face. The one that did not frighten me wrote me letters for three decades.

I never got to know my own hometown or its people. Not a moment too soon.

Now the lens is pointed at Adel, Cook County, Georgia — the place I am from and the people I come from. I am telling its story, not its history: nonlinear, jumping years, connecting an image to a surname to a road to a building that keeps turning up. The Cook Book: Because I'm Not Done Yet is the memoir and the manifesto of that.

And it has a second job. I want ordinary people to get past being afraid of this technology and into a less tedious, more creative life with it — by watching somebody do it in public, out of a small Georgia town, with what she already had lying around. Lead by example. Make it superior in spirit as much as in content.

I want to make everyone I talk to a star, because they are, and they don't know it. I think they deserve to know.