Sodom Laurel Album.  Photographs, oral histories, and text by Rob Amberg. 167 pages, 136 photographs, audio CD. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (in association with the Center for Documentary Studies), 2002. $45.00 cloth.    

     Rob Amberg came to the North Carolina mountains in 1973, a 26-year-old refugee from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. By his own admission, he arrived with stars in his eyes, afflicted by nostalgia for a past he’d never had and a place he’d never known. He worked at various jobs in the area for a couple of years, then found a position as a part-time photography instructor and archivist at Mars Hill College, not far from Asheville. One afternoon, a student took him to meet her 77-year-old great-aunt, Dellie Norton, a traditional Appalachian singer who had gained a modest degree of recognition during the folk revival of the 1960s and owner of a small mountain farm near the tiny community of Sodom Laurel. Ms. Norton and Amberg got along well, and before long he was staying in her spare bedroom and helping with the farm chores. He was also making a lot of pictures. Though he didn’t know it at the time, he had started on a project that would take 27 years to complete.
    Sodom Laurel Album is a good book. It succeeds quite nicely at much of what documentary photography does well. Amberg’s photographs tell us a lot, most of it well worth knowing, about people whose lives are unlike our own. His pictures make us privy to many of the facts of life in Sodom Laurel—the difficult topography its residents contend with every day, the houses they live in, the work they do, and the relationships they form—in ways that neither threaten, belittle, nor stereotype those facts. That’s no small accomplishment. Nor is there reason to doubt Amberg’s sensitivity and sincerity. He became deeply involved with the Sodom Laurel community over the years, living and working there for various periods of time, and this involvement shows in the easy familiarity of his pictures. None of the images seems intrusive or stolen, and even though some of the photographs are posed (portraits for the most part), none feels artificial. It’s evident in his pictures that he has a deep and abiding regard for many of the people he came to know in Sodom Laurel.
     Amberg’s photographs didn’t come by this relaxed, open quality easily. In the preface to Sodom Laurel Album, he shows that he’s thought long and hard enough about documentary photography to understand some of its shortcomings, especially the dangers posed by stereotypes—both building upon already-existing stereotypes and helping to create new ones—and photography’s inherent superficiality. The way in which the book’s pictures and texts (some of the words are Amberg’s, others are passages from recorded oral histories he conducted with Sodom Laurel residents) supplement one another is proof of intelligent engagement with these issues. Sodom Laurel Album avoids stereotypes by sometimes surprising us and occasionally even allowing image and text to contradict one another, and it achieves greater depth than many photographic documentaries by allowing words and pictures to work together in partnership rather than having one or the other dominate. Amberg also writes about how his understanding of the project grew over the years, making a slow evolution from "objective" documentary study to more subjective personal narrative. Here, too, Sodom Laurel Album provides more food for thought than many documentaries.
     All these nice things said (and meant), there’s still something that bothers me about Sodom Laurel Album. I had hoped to dismiss it as a mere quibble, but it seems to be demanding more attention than that. Essentially, my complaint is that the book seems all too much like what it says it is—an album. We learn a lot about various aspects of life in and around Sodom Laurel, but not much about the community’s center—whatever it is that holds the place and its people together. It’s difficult to say, in any specific sense, what the book’s about. Parts of it are devoted to the life of Dellie Norton, her extended family, and her small mountain farm. Other segments focus on her adopted disabled son Junior (actually a much younger cousin whose parent "gave" him to Dellie when he was small); area musicians and their travels to festivals in "foreign" places (the price of purchase includes an audio CD made by musicians with ties to the community); Sodom Laurel’s younger generation(s); public social events (family reunions, cemetery clean-ups, and the like); and tobacco agriculture. This last seems only tangentially related to Sodom Laurel. Although a few of the tobacco pictures are from Dellie Norton’s farm (taken in the mid-1970s, early on in Amberg’s project), most come from different times and places, some of them, apparently, not all that close to Sodom Laurel. My complaint is not, however, that Amberg casts his net too wide; instead, it’s that he hasn’t made (or allowed) these disparate groups of very fine pictures to hang together, to cohere, as well as they should (and surely could). Perhaps the fact that the photographs were all made by the same person in more or less the same place is focal point enough, but that places the center of attention on Amberg and his pictures rather than on their subjects. Judging from the self-effacing way he’s photographed and written about the people of Sodom Laurel, I don’t think that’s where he would want the focus to be.
     In the final analysis, though, it’s still a very nice book. Anyone interested in rural America, especially the interplay between traditional lifestyles and encroaching modernity, should be sure not to miss it.

DAVID WHARTON