Take Me to the Water from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.

Take Me to the Water is, above all else, a book about spectatorship. Largely without text, the photographs are without any sort of context and are in no certain order. After all, you’re looking at photos that, as collector Jim Linderman says, were “found in flea markets, auctions, antique shows, and such.” That the baptismal participants, each undergoing a potentially life-altering event, are nameless and without history can make the book frustrating. The baptisms in Take Me to Water are dynamic things, full of characters and action, and seem hardly content to be confined to a static photograph. These were people who believed actively, whose religious faith was inextricably tied to the land they lived on, and whose belief spilled out of the primitive wooden-frame buildings in which they likely worshiped into the land around them.

The lookers-on, present in almost all the photographs in numbers ranging from twos and threes to seemingly hundreds, are engaging in a sort of voyeurism — they are watching the baptismal candidates experience a formative moment in their lives, one that many recall as equal to marriage or the birth of a child.

But they’re not just watching — there’s an air of solemnity, almost as though the spectators are supervising this ritual. After all, being baptized in the old Protestant tradition is often accompanied by the act of formally “joining” a church, the moment where an individual signs a document and the members hold a vote on whether to accept said individual into their church (these votes are almost always merely symbolic). The lookers-on in this case are witnessing the induction of a new member into their community, and if the crowd size is any indication, the communities range from tiny backwoods churches to large urban congregations.

Luc Sante’s essay, one of only two sizable pieces of text in the book, centers around his own voyeurism of the baptismal moment. As what a friend of mine refers to as a “casual Catholic,” Sante seems to feel cheated that he didn’t get to participate in such a baptism, and laments that his own took place at an age before he could really remember it. He offers, in the simplest of terms, a brief explanation of what exactly a baptism is, as though the reader is primarily curious as to why all these people wanted to get their clothes all wet.

The accompanying CD, along with Lance Ledbetter’s notes on each track, is a real treasure. If you’re familiar with Ledbetter’s Athens-based label Dust to Digital, you’ll probably recognize several of the artists like Washington Phillips and his odd homemade harp. The CD works as a kind of soundtrack to the book itself, but it’s also a good introduction to early recording and American primitive music (I know, I know — the term rankles). Ledbetter’s first work and certainly his masterpiece so far, Goodbye Babylon, explores this music in exhaustive detail and is well worth the $100 price tag (it’s hand packed in a cedar box with raw Georgia cotton — sometimes I take it out just to smell it).

Take Me to the Water is wonderfully primitive and jagged. The photos are mostly amateurish, the participants mostly rough and rural, and the book itself is without order or context. (Linderman does, however, try to offer clues where available — the back of one photo reads: “Baptism at Rockville, W.VA;” another: “Baptising in the Schoharie River near Sloansville, 1917″). It’s a frustrating thing, but invaluable as a collection of moments from America’s rural past. You can find it here.