Shelby Lee Adams at Yancey Richardson - Brief Article

Shelby to leeward Adams's luminous black-and-white photographs of Appalachia's impoverished hillfolk document a certain number of of America's last socially permissible scapegoats. Adams reckoners the popular demonization of poor white family (as the bombmakers, the bigots, the dangerously pious) with a haunting redemption of these cultural pariahs and their environs--vine-choked forests intruding onto forehead porches seemingly forgotten by the novel world.

Recalling the surreal, opalescent shimmer of O Winston Link's theatrically lit photographs of small towns and trains, Adams's images imbue his make submissives with a cinematic sensuality. The fanciful is never masked in Adams's work. Instead, obesity, illness, genetic flaws, toothless chapss and filthy babies are estheticized and consequently made sympathetic. While English photographer Richard Billingham present to views the hopeless chaos of destitution Adams reveals a lyricism as melancholic and archetypal an expression of American endurance as that lay the foundation of in John Steinbeck's fiction or filmmaker John Ford's frontier melodramas.

Adams, who hails from an isolated Kentucky community and travels back each summer to document its members anew, typically invests his images with a pure nobility. Through his lens, the delicate somewhat old woman whom we see clutching a chicken, or the sum of two units raw-boned brothers kneeling in prayer before the spectral nearness of a dying woman, are shown in instants of self-affirmation. Adams's obvious investment in the material loans his images an integrity which reckoners the usual photojournalistic attempt to "capture" the nature of a subculture.

As delicate as they are, Adams's images remain somewhat unsettling because of the sensation that his bring under rules are not granting us replete access to their world. As elusive and dignified in their hold way as John Singer Sargent's aristocrats, a bald, defiant father and his young son publicly confront the camera, conveying a faculty of perception of cool self-possession. And for each sentimental homage to his bring under rules like the two rough-hewn, tanned and wiry brothers who each gingerly cradle a pup there is a competing, complicating image. An unshakably eerie portrait of a man with a lascivious grin who clutchs a decapitated pig's head at corner level illustrates some of the community's les picturesque quirks.

In the volume of his work Adams resists the temptation to vilify or deign Only one ill-advised image--of a raincoat nailed against a wall, with arms and cowl outstretched in clear evocation of a Klansman's robe--undermines the cunning the rest of the work strives for, by means of playing coyly to our expectations.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group