Exhibition Dates: September 5 - October 5, 2002
Opening reception for the artist: Saturday September 7, 2002, 2 - 5PM
Born in Hazard, Kentucky, Shelby Lee Adams has devoted 30 years of his life to visiting and making portraits of families living in backwoods Appalachia. Shelby’s photographs confront the viewer with representations of reality that do not avoid difficult subject matter as he continues to pursue his personal, expressive view of the human condition.
Using a large format camera to register details more clearly, the low-level lighting conditions required the use of artificial lighting to make adequate exposures. Over time, Shelby’s familiarity with his subjects as well as his desire to make a more honest statement beget the use of more complex lighting. His technical capabilities in lighting and printing combine to create black and white photographs that are both majestic and haunting.
Those familiar with Shelby’s work will see a change of appearance in today's Appalachia. Although initially his subjects followed a more traditional way of life, most of his earliest subjects have either passed away or find it no longer possible or imaginable to live as subsistence farmers and hunters. Their day-to-day existence is more closely connected to the outside world, and evidence of certain trappings, symbolic of a successful North American life, has entered into the frames of his photographs. While Appalachia is still a distinct culture that Shelby hopes to give a sense of, gone are the hand-made homes using newspaper for wallpaper only to be replaced by pre-fab aluminum trailers connected to the outside world via satellite dishes.
This exhibition, our third exhibit of Shelby's work, will coincide with the world premiere of a feature-length documentary, The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia, by Canadian filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier of Mercury Films (416) 955-9835. The film, which plays at the Toronto International Film Festival September 7 & 8, focuses on the controversy Adams' work generates and spends time with a number of his most significant subjects. The cast includes A.D. Coleman, the Napier Family, Mary Ellen Mark, the Childers family, Vicki Goldberg, Rachel Riddle, Wendy Ewald, Hort Collins and Dwight Billings.
