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Appalachian Lives

Amazon.com Price:  $48.01 (as of 06/05/2019 12:52 PST- Details)

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Description

This collection of eighty photographs specializes in present-day Appalachia, a region that “progress” has placed under siege.

This once poverty-stricken, mountain backwater has been invaded by four-lane interstates, cable television, Wal-Mart, and mobile homes. The people have largely abandoned log cabins and country stores and now shun overalls in favor of tee shirts that blaze advertising logos.

Over a period of twenty-five years Adams has traveled back to his home state of Kentucky with his cameras to document the lives of people there and to enrich and challenge out of doors perceptions of Appalachia.

His previous books–Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), both published by University Press of Mississippi–established the grace, intelligence, and wit with which Adams depicts life, in addition to the candor and straightforward honesty he evokes from his trusting subjects.

Adams photographed many of these faces several times all over his career. Appalachian Lives depicts how time and the out of doors world have affected the people dear to him. The boys of Appalachian Portraits now have grow to be the young men of Appalachian Lives. Old homesteads have changed hands. The elderly in earlier photographs have died, yet their features glow in the faces of descendants.

In her introduction Vicki Goldberg says, “Adams looks at a difficult subject with an artist’s eye. At their best, the complicated and ambiguous pictures in this book are an uncommon blend of humanity, reportage, and art, an Appalachia most of us thought we knew seen through eyes that let us know that maybe we didn’t comprehend it so well in spite of everything.”

Just as his photographs portray the richness and complexity of Appalachians, Adams’s accompanying text explains how he attains the level of accept as true with that allows him to continue photographing these people. He tells why the region continues to fascinate him. His reflections give context to the images and a sense of the lives lived out of doors of the photographic frame. His honesty about his interaction with his subjects, their on occasion wary reactions to him, and his personal history in the region infuse the photographs with an intimacy that only an Appalachian insider such as Adams could achieve.

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