The Marshall Project: Uncovering Wilmington life from the lens of a legendary photographer

If you were a young adult living your best life in Wilmington or Wrightsville Beach in the 1980s, '90s or even the 2000s, you almost certainly encountered the photographer and social butterfly Marshall Morgan.

In a time before cell phones, Morgan — striking, blonde and buff, like Wilmington's surfer dude answer to Fabio — was a one-man traveling photomat, circulating with his camera through the bars and clubs of downtown, treading the sands of Wrightsville Beach and finding any place that fun was being had to document the occasion on honest-to-god film.

Once he had a picture of you and/or your friends, Morgan would return to the scene of the good times to try to sell the photos for a few bucks.

Not everyone bought photos of themselves, of course, and over time the undelete-able items accumulated. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of color prints of people at area bars and on area beaches, filling plastic bags and tub after plastic tub and, eventually, taking up a big chunk of space in Morgan's home and in a storage shed.

Now, a man who's known Morgan for more than 35 years wants to not only preserve those thousands of photographs for posterity, but also help make a documentary film that would introduce the world to one of the more unique characters from recent Wilmington history.

In January, Ken Pennington, who was a 17-year-old freshman at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 1987 when he first met Morgan, set up a Facebook page and a GoFundMe page for The Marshall Morgan Project.

So far, Pennington has raised around $20,000 (of a $30,000 goal) toward digitizing Morgan's photo collection, setting up a website that Morgan could profit from and funding a documentary about his life and work.

"We have a chance to finally pay Marshall for the pictures he took," Pennington wrote on the Marshall Project's GoFundMe page. "This is to preserve our history."

Indeed, Morgan was taking photos of area people and places — some of the people no longer living, many of the places now closed — that weren't otherwise well-documented. Pennington said he's gotten some interest from the Wrightsville Beach Museum with helping to find grants for the project and/or preserving some of the photos.

"The outpouring of help has been phenomenal," Pennington said. "I'm excited to help (Morgan), because he's always been such a sweet man."

Pennington said that when he first met Morgan, 68, who still lives in the Wilmington area and still ventures out to take photos, they competed in a "best body on the beach" contest. Morgan won, and Pennington came in third. They soon became friends.

Morgan lived in a trailer park near Wrightsville Beach at the time and kept pet snakes, some of which he'd occasionally wear draped around his neck when out shooting photos.

"As a 17-year-old kid I found him fascinating," Pennington said.

The origins of the Marshall Project date to last November's North Carolina Holiday Flotilla in Wrightsville Beach. Morgan was there taking photos and caught the attention of both Pennington and the filmmaker Kimo Easterwood, who moved to the Wilmington area a couple of years ago.

"I'm in the documentary mindset so I'm always looking for stories," Easterwood said.

After spending some time with Morgan and seeing his massive photo collection, "I was like, 'This a doc. I'm doing it,'" Easterwood said. "I'm gonna spend the next year with him."

He said he realizes that the appeal of photos of Wilmington people and places is "very localized," but thinks that Morgan's story, a man living his own way and by his own rules, could appeal to a wider audience,

"He's got so many other levels and layers," Easterwood said. "I'm fascinated by people who don't live like other people."

So far, Easterwood has shot a short video, now on YouTube, that shows Morgan wearing flip-flops over socks and showing a film crew the dozens of tubs of photographs he's accumulated.

"Thirty thousand photos. Or, three hundred thousand. I can't remember my math," Morgan says, later amending the number to "between 400,000 and 600,000."

Pennington said he thinks the actual number might be closer to 100,000, although many of the photos are duplicates because "I always ordered triple prints," Morgan says in the video.

The photos chronicle a roughly 20-year period of Wilmington nightlife from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s. Morgan said he started taking photos in October of 1984, not long after he quit drinking.

"I had a big pattern, a circle" of spots he would hit, Morgan said, but if a band was playing at the legendary Mad Monk music venue in midtown, which closed in 1996, "I wouldn't go anywhere else … Sometimes I'd leave the Monk at 1, 1:30 and catch the closing of Red Dog's," now Jimmy's, at Wrightsville Beach.

Ultimately, even though he sold many of the photos, "It was a hobby," Morgan said. "Not much more than that."

Pennington said he's moved most of Morgan's photos out of his leaky shed and into a proper storage unit. On March 2, a crew will help him rebag the photos, many of which have been in deteriorating plastic bags for years now. On April 4, he'll load the pics into a cargo van and drive them to a facility in Greenville, South Carolina, to have them digitized.

He's not 100 percent sure how it will work yet, but Pennington said a next step will be building a pay-to-play website with all the photos for folks to browse.

Down the road he hopes to have a premiere for the documentary, along with a fundraising concert or perhaps an art show of Morgan's photos.

"I'm just so grateful he was there," Pennington said. "I'm a big history buff, and very nostalgic. I'm just intrigued by it. I want to see these pictures preserved."

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: How Wilmington, NC photographer Marshall Morgan's work is being saved