Photographer, priest, provocateur—and witness to a changing Knoxville.
I met Jan Lynch once.
Well, that’s not quite true. I met Jan several times, in the way you met people in Knoxville back in the day. You knew who people were. You saw them around. Maybe somebody introduced you once. Over time, memory turns that sort of familiarity into a meeting.
But I have one distinct memory of Jan.
I was still in high school, and for reasons I can’t entirely reconstruct, my high school drama teacher and I attended Mass one Sunday at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church, where Jan was filling in as priest. I wasn’t Catholic and at that age didn’t have much truck with religious traditions outside my own upbringing, but I remember Jan.
His homily had something to do with an apparition of the Virgin Mary. My drama teacher later opined, with some amusement, that Jan belonged to a school of priests who waited until they got to the pulpit for inspiration to descend rather than preparing too much in advance. I have no idea whether that was fair.
But I remember the gesture: Jan opening his arms, palms upward, in what struck my teenage eye as an exceedingly priestly gesture.
He was a striking figure.
I’ve been thinking about him again because my friend Ed White is currently assembling an exhibition of Jan’s photography at Tomato Head. Ed was Jan’s friend and is now his decreed archivist, working his way through boxes of negatives, prints and other material and gradually putting together a much fuller picture of Jan’s life and work. Much of what I’m drawing on here comes from Ed’s research and, importantly, his own memories of Jan.
The church is part of the story, although I don’t think it’s the story. Jan had been ordained a Byzantine Catholic priest and served in Ontario before returning to Knoxville. His relationship with the institutional church became, shall we say, complicated. Jan could apparently be a challenging figure wherever he planted himself.
But he never entirely left that world behind. Ed remembers Jan talking rapturously about the Byzantine rite and longing to say Mass again. Near the end of his life, Jan received an antimension, a consecrated cloth used in celebrating the liturgy, from his bishop in Canada. Ed remembers Jan showing it to him and handling it with extraordinary tenderness, carefully unfolding and refolding it.
I love that image of Jan because it complicates him.
He was a priest and a photographer, religious and irreverent, serious and mischievous. He photographed architecture, street life, artists, friends, drag performers and naked men. He could be reverent about one thing and gleefully provocative about another, and sometimes, I suspect, both at once.
But what interests me particularly about this exhibition is Jan’s Knoxville.
He seems to me now like one of those pivotal figures who inhabited Knoxville at the moment when one version of the city was beginning to become another. Downtown was not yet the downtown we know today. At night it could feel sketchy and strangely empty. Once the office workers went home, whole stretches seemed almost abandoned.
And yet things were happening there.
Artists, actors, dancers, gays, goths, hippies, punks and assorted other oddballs were building a community in those supposedly empty spaces. Tomato Head became one of its gathering places.
Ed remembers that world, too. He was part of it. For a while, he grew basil for us and traded it for pizza—which seems about right for the period. And as Ed works his way through Jan’s photographs now, he’s finding those same people everywhere: friends, artists, performers and assorted downtown characters moving between Jan’s world and Tomato Head’s.
One of those people was my friend Lemmie Smith, also known in drag as Silva Lamé. Lemmie was another of those Knoxville figures who seemed to move naturally between worlds. I worked with Lemmie at the Clarence Brown Theatre, where he sometimes acted. He was part of that larger cultural stew, too, and, like Jan, died much too soon.
In my memory, that Knoxville is somehow already black and white.
That’s probably unfair to reality, which I’m reasonably certain occurred in color. But so many of my associations with that period have been reinforced by Jan’s photographs that black and white now feels like the proper medium for remembering it. Empty streets. Storefronts. People standing outside businesses. Festivals. Faces. Characters who seemed permanent at the time and are now gone.
Eventually downtown became desirable again. It was cleaned up, repopulated and gentrified. We oddballs even became part of the attraction for a while—the gays and goths and artists and thespians and hippies and punks, occasionally gawked at by visitors as if we’d been thoughtfully installed by the tourism bureau.
But Jan photographed that world before it became picturesque.
He wasn’t visiting it.
He lived here. He walked these streets—literally, since he never owned a car. These were his friends, acquaintances, subjects, churches, restaurants, storefronts and peculiar Knoxville characters. His camera wasn’t looking into this world from outside. It was already inside it.
That’s part of what makes the Tomato Head exhibition feel so right. It isn’t simply that Tomato Head has wall space and Jan made photographs. The photographs are returning to one of the places where the world Jan photographed actually gathered.
Ed calls the exhibition Homecoming, and the word seems increasingly apt. These aren’t simply old photographs being put on a wall. People are coming home in them. Places are coming home. A version of Knoxville is coming home.
And perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to that first memory of Jan.
Before I knew anything about Jan Lynch the photographer, there he was in front of me: this striking, slightly mysterious man standing in a church, opening his arms as if something might descend.
All these years later, Ed White is still opening Jan’s boxes.
And, wonderfully, things keep coming out.