Baldwin Photographic Gallery through January 19
by Peter Chawaga
Rooster
It can be hard to believe the photographs are real. They depict scenes that appear lost in time if not from a differentreality altogether. Crowds of children missing shirts and shoes stare ominously into the lens. Adults with weathered skin pose in front of ramshackle buildings and cluttered rooms. Structures barely emerge from the landscapes that host them, threatening to be lost completely at any moment.
Others are more hopeful, if just as uncanny. Hardened women holding babies on their hips. Grinning men with banjos and guitars. Families proudly inviting the viewer into their crowded homes or wildly green yards.
The life’s work of Shelby Lee Adams has been to capture these moments that are very much a daily reality for his subjects in Eastern Kentucky and to share them with audiences all over the world. His photographs have been collected by more than 60 museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Survey Grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Photography Fellowship, and has been given grants and had his work collected by the Polaroid Corporation.
Roy with Sister and New Bride
“After 40 years of photographing in Eastern Kentucky, where I was born, I’ve dealt with all kinds of issues and all kinds of problems,” Adams says. “It’s not just a portfolio about poverty. There are all kinds of other issues, social issues, cultural issues, historical issues . . . My work is about people and the complicated relationships and lifestyles of the Appalachian culture. That’s really the arc of my work.”
A native of Hazard, Kentucky, Adams has never taken for granted the fact that these people, many of whom were his friends growing up, welcomed his camera into their lives and that his success has depended on their hospitality. When his first of four books, Appalachian Portraits, was published in 1993, he made sure that each subject received a copy. In many cases, the book stands on their mantles, opened to the pages on which they are featured. His feeling of obligation to the community he has captured has never left him.
When it was time to decide where to archive his life’s work, Adams considered giving his collection to a school in the Southwest. When it refused to use the collection to raise money for his subjects in Eastern Kentucky, Adams called Tom Jimison, a friend from graduate school and a professor and curator for over 25 years at Middle Tennessee State University. The two arranged for the archive to live there.
“It’s taken many years to get this thing to happen before I was able to sell the university on this idea,” Jimison says. “For his print sales, Shelby wanted some of that money to come back to the people in Eastern Kentucky. You can see that he remembers where his roots came from.”
Adams agreed to make about 1,000 extra prints that will be for sale by MTSU. Half of the proceeds will go to the university and the other half to the communities in Appalachia that have been the lifeblood of Adams’s work.
Ned in His Front Yard
“They will be able to offer works for sale and the money will then go into a fund to support a photo student scholarship at MTSU, and that would be matched with a special fund to help send money to my subjects and families in Eastern Kentucky that I’ve photographed for all these years,” Adams says. “This has never been done before to my knowledge. My work has been 30 or 40 years with certain families, so I have maybe 20 families that I’m going to give to MTSU to support after my death.”
The archiving will be celebrated with a months-long exhibition as well as a lecture from Adams. “I’ll be showing a lot of work that has never been published before but will be in this archive,” Adams says. “I’ve got not only my Appalachian work, but my other photography work as well, done in third world countries, the Middle East, Egypt, and South America. I will probably show some of that work as the arc of the whole archive.”
Tyler and Sheba
Another benefit of having the collection housed at MTSU is that it will be accessible to those in Eastern Kentucky. Adams will invite some of his subjects and their families to attend his presentation. He’ll be sure they each get copies of the photographs that have brought their joys and pains to the rest of the world.
“It’s not just a portfolio about poverty. There are all kinds of other issues, social issues, cultural issues, historical issues . . . My work is about people and the complicated relationships and lifestyles of the Appalachian culture.”
The Happy Baby
MTSU will be hosting selections from Adams’s archive in its Baldwin Photographic Gallery, 1301 E. Main Street in Murfreesboro, through January 19. Adams will lecture on the archive on November 17 at 7 p.m., followed by a reception. For more information, please visit www.baldwinphotogallery.com.
