SLIDESHOW: Morning in Fountain, Part 2

Fountain Fest, Music Maker’s new music festival in eastern North Carolina, is next Saturday, October 17! Co-founder and Executive Director Tim Duffy takes you on a photographer’s tour of Fountain with more breathtaking photos, taken in the early morning with a soft-focus lens in summer 2026.

I have come to love the early mornings in Fountain, NC. I am often here before much of the town is awake, walking with a camera when the streets are empty and the light is soft. These photographs were made with an old soft-focus lens, which seems particularly suited to that hour. The buildings lose some of their hard edges, the light spreads, and this little town I know so well becomes slightly mysterious.

Music Maker’s main offices remain in Hillsborough, but Fountain has become our artistic and creative center—a place for making things. We have built a recording studio and photography studio here, and the old workshop of our friend, guitar maker and artist Freeman Vines, has become the Freeman Vines Gallery.

Fountain has also become a retreat for Music Maker artists and staff: somewhere to get away from the noise and demands of everyday work, spend time together, record music, make photographs, write, think, and create.

I have photographed people and places across the South for more than forty years, but there is something wonderful about having a place you can return to again and again. Most mornings in Fountain, almost nobody is around. I walk, I look, and I make photographs.

– Tim Duffy

Co-Founder and Executive Director, Music Maker Foundation