Appalachinan Lives.
Photographs and Text by Shelby Lee Adams. Introduction by Vicki Goldberg. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 120 pages. 80 photographs. $50.00.

Appalachian Lives is Shelby Lee Adams’s third book of photographs, following upon Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), both also published by the University Press of Mississippi. As with those earlier volumes, the photographs in Appalachian Lives are from eastern Kentucky--where Adams was born and raised but no longer lives--and almost all are portraits. The subjects in Appalachian Lives tend to be a bit younger than in the earlier books. They are more likely to live in mobile homes than cabins and to wear T-shirts proclaiming allegiance to a professional wrestler than work clothes. Adams has posed them less frequently with signs of an older, more traditional (and more stereotypical) Appalachia than in surroundings that suggest change--there are more satellite dishes in evidence on the pages of Appalachian Lives than bibles.

Adams’s photographs are environmental portraits. They are as much concerned with showing the physical spaces eastern Kentuckians have created for themselves to live in as with faithfully rendering physical likeness and character. One of the things this means is that his pictures are anything but spontaneous. They are elaborately previsualized, meticulously set up (often requiring the intricate balancing of several different light sources, both natural and artificial), and painstakingly achieved through trial and error, using multiple sheets of Polaroid film before arriving at a satisfactory end result. Adams takes considerable time arranging his subjects, sometimes large groups of them--family members, drinking buddies, boyfriends, neighbor kids, dogs, whoever happens to be around that day--in places of his choosing (usually outdoors but not always) around the family home. Sometimes people get bored and wander off before he can make the final exposure. Most seem happy enough to pose for him, however; many of his portraits bespeak an easy, good-natured collaboration between photographer and subject.

Adams’s images from eastern Kentucky have received a good deal of criticism from those who see his work as violating certain standards of documentary truth they expect from photography, especially pictures that depict out-of-the-mainstream people from out-of-the-mainstream places. These critics claim that Adam’s calculated way of making photographs takes his subjects so far out of their everyday lives as to render them fictional. Some charge him with victimizing his subjects through repeated visual reference to various "hillbilly" or "white trash" stereotypes--rundown mobile homes, missing teeth, junked cars, physical deformities, etc. Adams has equally passionate defenders, however: those from the fine art end of the photocritical spectrum who perceive his work as having transcended photography’s seeming responsibility to documentary truth (long an anchor weighing the medium down, they would claim) and risen to the level of high visual art, one of the few examples of “straight,” documentary-style photography to have achieved such rarefied status.

This is not the place to attempt to resolve this issue. There’s no denying that Shelby Lee Adams’s environmental portraits from eastern Kentucky are beautiful, sophisticated, and fueled by a high degree of creative intelligence. At the same time, one can’t help but wonder what, if anything, has been sacrificed to achieve such elegance. Even so, there’s little doubt that the photographs are full of important information; one senses fundamental truths about people’s lives on every page of Adams’s books, even if those truths are sometimes more poetic than literal. Suffice it to say that Appalachian Lives, as well as Adams’s earlier books, walks that fine, but all too blurry, line between documentary and art. Sometimes his imagery seems more at home in one camp, sometimes the other. Much of the time, however, it seems pretty comfortable in both, which is high praise.

David Wharton