Shelby Lee Adams: Modern Appalachia

NEW YORK CITY: Yossi Milo Gallery announces "Modern Appalachia," an exhibition of new black-and-white photographs by Shelby Lee Adams. The exhibition opens on Friday, April 12 and closes on Saturday, June 1, with a reception for the artist on Friday, April 12 from 6:00-8:30 p.m.

For almost three decades, Shelby Lee Adams has been photographing friends and relatives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, including Perry County (where the artist was born) and Letcher County (where the artist grew up). The photographs in "Modern Appalachia" are part of a series that the artist began in 1973, but the images in this exhibition-taken from 1999-2001-reflect a new Appalachia, which has experienced changes not unlike the rest of the country. Adams finds that his subjects are less likely to live off the land and more likely to embrace the media culture, as reflected in the fancier dress that his subjects choose, the mobile homes that appear with increasing frequency, or the satellite dishes that dot the landscape ["Donnie with Baby & Cows," 1999, "Peggy & Albert Campbell," 1999].

Adams is not a documentary photographer, and he does not attempt to be objective when he photographs his subjects-all of whom are friends and some of whom are relatives-year after year. The artist spends two or three months each summer in eastern Kentucky visiting with people and taking photographs. A visit might last for several hours, and the artist usually enters the home with several pieces of equipment (e.g., four-by-five view camera, tripod, assorted lenses, as many as five light sources, umbrellas, light stands, meter, and yards of electrical cord). The result is an elaborately staged image that is a collaboration with Adams' subjects, many of whom the artist has visited and photographed frequently over the years.

Adams' work has been published widely, and his photographs fill two books, Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), both published by the University Press of Mississippi. Adams' third book, Modern Appalachia, which includes images from this exhibition, is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2003. A documentary film about Adams and his work is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2002.

Shelby Lee Adams has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, Cleveland Museum of Art, Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland. From 1998-2001, his exhibition "Shelby Lee Adams, Appalachian Portraits" traveled from Switzerland to museums in France, Spain, and Finland. Adams' photographs appear in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Cincinnati Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in Washington.