by Jon Lackman | 3 January 2008 | Photography
A recent issue (29.2) of Studies in American Culture includes an essay by Larry Vonalt (who died in 2005) on “The Dignity of Shelby Lee Adams’s ‘Disturbing’ Family Photograph’:
The photographs in Shelby Lee Adams’s first two monographs, Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), attracted praise and, often in his native Eastern Kentucky, blame. The blame focuses mostly on the subjects of Adams’s photographs and reflects an almost obsessive concern with what his critics might call “stereotyping” … George Brosi, an English professor at Eastern Kentucky University … wrote in Appalachian Heritage:
This is a time when almost all photography books are attempting to portray the dignity of diverse people. A degrading book of photographs focusing on most ethnic or geographical groups would be unthinkable. Appalachian Portraits is a photography book which chooses as its subjects four sometimes overlapping categories of people: the retarded, the disfigured, the poor and snake handling people of faith.
These brief comments comprise Brosi’s entire review.
… What offends in [his work] depends upon the eye of the beholder. Some people simply find pictures of poverty and deformity repulsive; their taste tells them that such scenes are not “beautiful” and need not be depicted. Others are angered because they see this image as another representation of the crimes of capitalism … [others] believe that it belittles them by suggesting that only families such as [these] exist in the Appalachian region … [what many] fail to realize is that it is not just the “outsiders” who stereotype “us.” We “insiders” do a good job of stereotyping other “insiders” …
(In 2002, Jennifer Baichwal released a documentary on Shelby Lee Adams, The True Meaning of Pictures. Interview with the filmmaker here.)
