Shelby Lee Adams

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Shelby Lee Adams (born 1950) is an American photographer. He is best known for his photographs of people in the Appalachian region of the United States.

The influence of classic photographers and Southern writers and others who have documented the Appalachian region is clear in the work of Shelby Lee Adams. An image such as The Home Funeral, however, crystallizes the familiar shacks and extended families into something unexpected. Using multiple strobes and an 8×10 view camera, Adams achieves both a special quality of light and a depth of field that keeps everything, from the wall-calendar in the foreground to the stark bulb on the ceiling to the ferns above the coffin, in focus. Adams’s composition – marked by sharp division of space and clarity of detail – places the viewer in the role of omniscient visitor to this otherwise private moment. Adams himself, having grown up in Kentucky and familiar with the mountain culture, is both an insider and an outside observer – a dichotomy the documentary photographer must frequently confront. He takes on this role once again in Leddie and Children, conveying a juxtaposition of both the claustrophobic familial closeness and the wide open space of the landscape itself.

Shelby Lee Adams was born in 1950 in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. He now lives there as well as in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. Appalachia is not only Adams’s birthplace, but the subject of his photographs as well. His images, focusing on the lives of the people of Appalachia, have been shown in one-person exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art; the International Center of Photography, New York; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; and the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York. His work is also included in the collections of many major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. Adams’s photographs have been published in two volumes: Appalachian Legacy (1998) and Appalachian Portraits (1993).

—Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Museum of Contemporary Photography

[edit] The True Meaning of Pictures

An uncompromising documentary concerning Shelby Lee Adams and his interactions with his Appalacian subjects was made by Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, in The True Meaning of Pictures. Reviews of this movie are available at Rotten Tomatoes.

[edit] Works

• Appalachian Portraits (1993)

• Leddie and the Children (1990) http://mocp.org/collections/permanent/adams_shelby_lee.php
• The Home Funeral (1990)

[edit] References

• Jeffrey, Ian et al (1997). The Photography Book. London:Phaidon Press Limited. ISBN 0-7148-4488-8
• Adams, Shelby Lee. Appalachian Legacy: Photographs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
• Adams, Shelby Lee. Appalachian Lives. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
• Adams, Shelby Lee and Lee Smith. Appalachian Portraits. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.