Salt & Truth

For more than thirty-five years, American photographer Shelby Lee Adams, has worked dedicatedly and deliberately with a view camera and film, returning each year to eastern Kentucky, to the mountains where he was born and raised, to the people he has befriended and been accepted by, to create a lasting chronicle of a mountain people.

Adams is often touted as a photographer of Appalachia and that is a fair description though perhaps not specific enough. Adams has worked all these years mostly in some six or seven counties in Eastern Kentucky, the area in which his family had lived for generations. The people that he connects with are comprised of the same fabric of which he himself is made. Part southern, part social, part guarded, part generous, part spiritual and, uniquely, part holler.

Of the eighty photographs in this collection, most were taken over the past seven years and for those who have followed his remarkable career, these photographs demonstrate how, in some ways, these hollers have changed with time. While the satellite dishes and University of Kentucky t-shirts suggest the encroachment of a larger culture, the timeless faces and the extended families on front porches remind us that some ideas, and some people, remain constant.

At his roots, Adams is a humanist. He doesn’t judge his subjects and his images are essentially collaborative in nature. These are documents fashioned to record an authentic time and place and meant to expose the depth and character of a disappearing lifestyle. Common to all of these images, is a sense of dignity and of perseverance supported by an extraordinary measure of trust because Adams’s distinctive ability has as much to do with the intuitive nature of compassion and acceptance as it does the technical and visual mastery of the photographic process.