Walker Percy's Photographer

The author at home, at work, in thought

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Christopher Harris was a freelance photojournalist living in New Orleans and shooting for the likes of Time and Newsweek when, in 1977, he received an assignment from People magazine to go to Covington, Louisiana, to shoot a writer named Walker Percy. “New Orleans being a city where everybody knows everybody else, Walker knew that I’d worked with John Kennedy Toole’s mother, so he asked for me to be the photographer,” recalled Harris, who is now a professor in the College of Media and Entertainment at Middle State University in Tennessee. The resulting shoot was the first of many that took place over a twelve-year period, in which Harris gained the confidence and friendship of the National Book Award-winning writer and created portfolios of iconic images that capture Percy’s abiding grace and piercing observational skills. 

This year, the centennial of Walker Percy’s birth, Christopher Harris and Percy-aficionado Richmond Powers are preparing to publish a book that compiles these images for the first time. At this month’s Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville, they will present a sneak preview in the form of a program called “Adventures Between Daylight and Dark,” a behind-the-scenes exploration that reveals the revered, enigmatic literary figure as he lived, worked, and thought. 

 ©Photo by Christopher R. Harris. All rights reserved. 

Over the years, Harris photographed Percy the writer, Percy the thinker, and Percy the husband and friend in many Covington environs: at home with his wife, Bunt, walking the banks of the Bogue Falaya River, signing books on the porch of the Kumquat bookstore, and, finally, at work at his writer’s desk. The penetrating images not only confirm the author’s quest to make sense of the disquiet he perceived gnawing at the soul of modern man but also capture less well-appreciated aspects of the man, namely his deep comic sensibility and his sheer love of people. “He wanted me to photograph what it was to be a writer,” Harris recalled. “And what I saw was his absolute enchantment with the world around him. He was a consummate voyeur of people—the crap they got themselves into and the way they got out of those situations. The happiest I ever saw him was when he was signing books because he loved the stories that people would tell, that he could collect.” 

Percy liked to be photographed in black and white, which suited Harris just fine, noting that he loves black and white “because you lose the psychology of color.” But in 1989, the year before his death, Percy called wanting something different. “It was the only time he asked me to shoot in color, and it was the only time he let me into his writing area,” Harris remembered. “It was this wonderful cedar-planked room filled with texts that were dog-eared with his having gone through them. It was almost like a birthing room, and he let me see how he worked, with a yellow legal pad and a pen.” 

Harris believes that Percy, aware that his time was short, chose to share one last chapter in his story of what it meant to be the kind of writer whose startling explorations of the human condition are still attracting new readers twenty-six years after his death. “I’ve covered a lot of writers,” he said, “and almost all the good ones tie themselves down to their writing completely. But Walker loved sharing other experiences. I think he would have been an incredible movie director because he was constantly putting me in situations where I could get these wonderful images.” 

The third annual Walker Percy Weekend takes place in St. Francisville this June 3—5. Complete details, including speakers, topics, and social events, are detailed here.