John Sullivan is a photographer. He makes photography look easy, just as Truman Capote did.
Sullivan has little interest in a narrative. His is impressionistic, photographic writing driven by an open, curious mind. He is especially good at writing about people, for people supply their own narrative by virtue of living. In the “Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” his writing is akin to a stack of B&W street photographs. The narrative the protagonist's life supplies culminates in exposing secular humanism as self-evident.
Is Sullivan's writing particularly Southern? Adam Gopnik wrote that science was competitive storytelling. Sullivan does not compete. He is nonjudgemental and kind. Is Southern excellence achieved by means other than competition?
