Cedric Chatterley's photos of Honeyboy Edwards are on display at Perkins Library.

Durham, NC - "When you're making art, you can't be wrong when you feel a pull and decide to go with it," says photographer Cedric Chatterley. He felt that strange pull one day at a music festival in 1990 when he first came across bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards.

It was the beginning of long journey for Chatterley, who spent seven years touring with Honeyboy and documenting his life in a series of photographs, now archived at Duke Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library. The result is a remarkable and comprehensive depiction of an artist and a music form. Selected photographs from the collection are currently on display in the Special Collections Gallery in Perkins Library.

"It was totally serendipitous that I found him. When I look back on it I feel that I was led to him," Chatterley says.

Chatterley's challenge: How do you take a picture of the blues? He started by absorbing Edwards' oral history, and then visited the people and places from the bluesman's past.

Among the images in the collection is a now vacant lot in Greenwood, Miss., where Edwards crossed paths with blues legend Robert Johnson.

Another is a ghostly landscape overlooking empty rail lines in East St. Louis. Others show Edwards' relatives holding family portraits, and the musician wandering among headstones in Shaw Mississippi, searching for his mother's grave.

"To me, there's an immense amount of connection between the visual arts and music," Chatterley says. "I read about the places where he lived as a child. I returned to those places and was determined to try and make photographs that sounded like Honeyboy, that sounded like his voice or felt like his music."

To help the viewers "hear" Edwards' music through the photographs, Chatterley chose square format images to relax the viewer's sense of time, and shot in black and white so he could orchestrate the range of dark tones.

"If you look at a 35mm image, there's a feeling of immediacy, like something you would see in the newspaper. For me a square format lends itself to doing things that are about memory. It slows things down a little bit," Chatterley says.

"There's a feeling of history. It also provides a larger negative, which gives a smoother tonal range. I like images with a fair amount of dark places that have shadow detail."

In the end Chatterley says he came to see Edwards not just as a friend, but as a mentor. "He was able to take what was internal, and what was external, and weave them together. That's the better part of music, and if you can do that with image-making, you're succeeding."

Chatterley's capacity to engage his subjects can be seen in "Reciprocity," a related exhibit of his photographs and hand-made cameras now on display at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. Chatterley began making his own cameras about five years ago. (See photos of installation of the exhibit here.)

"Where image making is going now, it's becoming so highly technical and so impersonal, that I wanted to put my hands back into it," says Chatterley, who has fashioned cameras out of old furniture, an engine and a child's accordion, adding antique lenses and shutters he buys on eBay.

Often, he involves the person he will photograph in the actual process of designing the camera that will produce their image.

"My friend Mark is a motorhead like me, so I thought that's the kind of camera I should use to make his portrait," Chatterley says about his Briggs and Stratton engine cylinder camera.

"That's all a camera is -- a box. When people see that, it tells them, photography is still magic, and it still can be in our own hands, and completely within the grasp of our own craft."