About The Exhibit
This exhibit explores and highlights the multimedia connections between the photography
and journalistic work of Swiss writer Annemarie
Schwarzenbach, the fiction of American author
Cormac McCarthy, and the music and photography
of the German band Buddy and the Huddle across
seven decades, from the 1930s to the 1990s. All of
these artists and writers visited — or in McCarthy’s
case, lived — in Knoxville and depicted the South
and in particular Knoxville in their works.
The photos and accompanying text connect McCarthy’s
1979 novel Suttree that features Knoxville in the 1950s to the
photojournalistic work of Annemarie Schwarzenbach who
visited the Southeastern United States in the fall of 1937.
An additional historical layer is added via the work of the
German, Nuremberg-based band Buddy and the Huddle. The
lead musicians of this band, Roland Kopp and Michael Ströll,
were so enamored with Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree that,
in 1996, they traveled to Knoxville to record several tracks of the
album “Music For a Still Undone Movie Maybe Called Suttree”
inspired by the characters and locations described in this book.
During their Knoxville visit, Roland Kopp and Michael Ströll
from Buddy and the Huddle also took hundreds of thus far
unpublished black and white photographs. These images, in
many ways, capture a similar mood to that sensed in
Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s photojournalistic work and
McCarthy’s fiction about the “scruffy city.”
About The Exhibit
This exhibit explores and highlights the multimedia connections between the photography
and journalistic work of Swiss writer Annemarie
Schwarzenbach, the fiction of American author
Cormac McCarthy, and the music and photography
of the German band Buddy and the Huddle across
seven decades, from the 1930s to the 1990s. All of
these artists and writers visited — or in McCarthy’s
case, lived — in Knoxville and depicted the South
and in particular Knoxville in their works.
The photos and accompanying text connect McCarthy’s
1979 novel Suttree that features Knoxville in the 1950s to the
photojournalistic work of Annemarie Schwarzenbach who
visited the Southeastern United States in the fall of 1937.
An additional historical layer is added via the work of the
German, Nuremberg-based band Buddy and the Huddle. The
lead musicians of this band, Roland Kopp and Michael Ströll,
were so enamored with Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree that,
in 1996, they traveled to Knoxville to record several tracks of the
album “Music For a Still Undone Movie Maybe Called Suttree”
inspired by the characters and locations described in this book.
During their Knoxville visit, Roland Kopp and Michael Ströll
from Buddy and the Huddle also took hundreds of thus far
unpublished black and white photographs. These images, in
many ways, capture a similar mood to that sensed in
Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s photojournalistic work and
McCarthy’s fiction about the “scruffy city.”
...the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle...
— Annemarie Schwarzenbach —