Shelby Lee Adams returns each summer to the back roads of Appalachia and seeks out families he has photographed there for nearly 20 years.
He takes along a few hundred 8-by-10-inch prints from the previous year’s trip, the only pictures some elderly people have had taken since their weddings and the only portraits many mothers possess of their babies.
“Nothing has changed over the 20 years, and that’s really something in our world of constant flux,” Adams says. “The Sloans and the Napiers could go back four generations and their immediate world has not changed. . . . With the Napiers, none of the sons are married and so their family is kind of shrinking. But at the Sloans’, there’s always a new grandchild and I make lots of pictures for them that have nothing to do with my own work. But then I ask them to pose for me,” says Adams.
“Appalachian Portraits,” on exhibit at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, features matriarchs Berthie Napier and Leddie Sloan in family portraits that are remarkable for their strength and dignity. The black and white images confront many of the raw wounds of human life. (The Edelman show features new work; a larger exhibit of Adams’ Appalachian photographs from 1976 through 1992 opened Friday at the International Center of Photography in New York.)
Adams balances references to retardation, deformity, death and ramshackle housing with the grace and independence of the mountain people who cherish their old ways of life.
Members of the growing middle class of Appalachia have criticized Adams, saying his pictures reinforce stereotypes about the area’s poverty. The poverty shows. But so do the spirituality and warmth within extended families that root the lives of people whom Adams says don’t consider themselves poor.
He emphasizes that he isn’t trying to offer an overview of Appalachia, where towns such as Hazard, Ky.-his birthplace-now have up-to-date hospitals, fast food restaurants and discount stores.
He has retreated instead to remote locales cut off from mainstream society. He photographed farmer Scotty Stidham on the land he has farmed for more than 60 years. Another subject was the hermit Ellis Bailey, who provided herbal remedies to the community, lived in a two-room shack and had saved $100,000 by the time he died.
Adams’ photographs are reminiscent of those taken by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others who documented the ravages of the 1930s Depression for the Farm Security Administration. The work calls to mind as well the blunt stare that Diane Arbus leveled at social outcasts and other outsiders.
Like his predecessors, Adams asks viewers to recognize themselves in the fundamental hopes and vulnerabilities evidenced by people they might ordinarily consider very different. But his agenda is personal, too, as he explores his own past in the fast-disappearing way of life that his photographs preserve.
“I’m working in a documentary tradition, but documentary photography is associated in my mind with Life magazine and stories about Istanbul or Vietnam. I’m more like a fiction writer trying to convey a story of my childhood,” he says.
Adams spent his childhood on the move. His father’s job in the natural gas industry took him to New York when he was in first grade, Philadelphia when he was in second, Miami Beach in third. But he spent summers in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, where his two sets of grandparents owned huge adjoining farms.
Those summers sparked his awareness of how unique Appalachia is. He decided to make pictures there once he turned from painting to photography while in college. An uncle, a country doctor who provided free medical care in the mountains, introduced Adams to the first of his subjects. They, in turn, introduced him to others in a chain of friendships and relationships that now extend into Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
Adams’ book “Appalachian Portraits,” published last year (University of Mississippi Press), made introductions even easier. With his insider’s view, he gets beyond the ravages of age, hard work and poverty to deliver epiphanies about life and death. In one photograph, two elderly brothers kneel together and pray for their dying mother. In another, a young mother fights back tears as her own small children gather near a coffin during a home funeral.
“My approach is to experience life on their terms,” he says. “The difference is that I can leave when I want to and they can’t. I have a ticket out.” Adams, 43, is a commercial photographer living in Salem, Mass., and an artist who teaches workshops and seminars nationwide.
But he always comes back to Appalachia, renting a house for the two or three months that he stays every summer. Much of his time is spent driving the long stretches between homesteads, sitting for long, quiet hours on front porches and sharing family meals.
Adams works with a 4-by-5 view camera and says he considers each of his photographs a collaboration. Grandparents may stand behind him and offer suggestions on photographing their families. People sometimes view the Polaroid test shots he leaves with them and ask if they can pose again with different props. Not everyone agrees to the partnership right away. One elderly woman who had refused to be photographed over the years donned her lace-collared dress this summer and finally posed.
This summer, too, Adams got the shot of one of Appalachia’s few remaining swinging bridges, a 500-foot wire and plank structure that spans the Kentucky River and sways like a trapeze every step of the way across.
Adams took pictures at the same bridge last summer and didn’t like the results. This time, he photographed Scotty Stidham’s great granddaughters on the bridge just as the sun began to dip behind the mountains and a glaze of soft, filtered light fell across them.
“I wanted that summer evening light,” he says. “I had proofs; I had negatives from the year before. I knew the lighting. I knew the picture was there. But it was important to find the lighting, the girls and everything all together. By the time I took it, it was 7:30 in the evening and fifteen minutes later that light was totally gone.”
The dreamlike bridge sheltering two young girls on its precarious footing is the perfect metaphor for Adams’ continued crossing between two worlds.
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“Shelby Lee Adams: Appalachian Portraits” continues through Oct. 8 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior St.; 312-266-2350.
