![\"A.](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/ADC_September_2013.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I consider my brief public comments<\/a> on the subject of Shelby Lee Adams’s photographs of Appalachia, as excerpted in Jennifer Baichwal’s film,\u00a0The True Meaning of Pictures<\/a><\/em>, evenhanded, sensible, and hardly controversial.<\/p>\n So I’m surprised that some have taken\u00a0offense\u00a0at what I view as\u00a0my eminently reasonable assumption that Adams’s rural collaborators don’t understand how these carefully staged and distinctly\u00a0noir<\/em>-ish images get interpreted\u00a0by the audiences to which Adams energetically markets them. Not because those audiences carry around prejudicial stereotypes they project onto the supposedly neutral or positive images, but because the images come loaded with triggers \u2014 embedded therein by the combination\u00a0of Adams’s heavy directorial hand and his stylistic mannerisms\u00a0\u2014 that activate those stereotypes, even in viewers prepared to set any preconceptions aside.<\/p>\n Those typical consumers of his work would include photo and art gallery and museum visitors with some grounding in and awareness of photographic practice;\u00a0critics, historians, curators, and collectors of photography; practitioners of and scholars in the fields of documentary photography, film, and video (including photo teachers and their students); buyers of pricey photography monographs; readers of the kinds of glossy periodicals in which these pictures get reproduced;\u00a0and the general audience for contemporary photography.<\/p>\n “The Night of the Hunter” (1956), poster<\/p><\/div>\n I can guarantee you that film blogger Marilyn Ferdinand<\/a> and Appalachia-booster Mark Lynn Ferguson would never suggest that viewers with no awareness of\u00a0filmmaking techniques or\u00a0film history would understand how\u00a0Citizen Kane <\/em>\u2014 or, to take an example closer to home in terms of locale,\u00a0The Night of the Hunter<\/em> \u2014 resonated at the time of their respective premieres or how they signify today; how they achieve their visual and narrative effects; how POV and lighting and montage and staging and choice of lenses and selective focus and framing, as aspects of directorial style and strategy, shape the contents of these films into their content.<\/p>\n Awareness at that level doesn’t require going to film school, or working in the film industry, or reading deeply in the history and criticism and theory of film. Indeed, a non-specialist from another part of Appalachia\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Knoxville, Tennessee\u00a0\u2014\u00a0with no formal education in film, figured it out mostly by himself, becoming a germinal film critic: James Agee (who also wrote the screenplay for\u00a0The Night of the Hunter<\/em>, among other movies). It didn’t hurt that he’d gone to college and studied literature, but that hardly qualified him as a film critic. He earned his place in film history not just by watching films and responding to them, but by developing an analytical relationship to them.<\/p>\n Photography projects\u00a0like Adams’s\u00a0manifest a complexity comparable to that of films. That doesn’t mean that more than a few rise to the level of the Orson Welles and Charles Laughton films mentioned above. But there’s a reverse condescension, a bullshit egalitarianism, in pretending that a high-school student’s “response paper” in reaction to\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/em>\u00a0has the same gravitas as the essay by Alfred Kazin that positioned Melville’s magnum opus\u00a0centrally in American literature. The same\u00a0mawkish, patronizing, white-liberal tendency permeates the assertions of Ferdinand and Ferguson that Adams’s subjects understand exactly what the images on which they “collaborate” with him convey to the outside world.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n Jennifer Baichwal, “The True Meaning of Pictures” (2002), dvd<\/p><\/div>\n It doesn’t surprise me that Adams’s subjects don’t bring any analytical tools to bear on the issues of visual imagery, and therefore spend their on-screen time in Baichwal’s film talking instead about the people in the pictures and their personal relationships with the photographer. It does amaze me that a film devotee like Ferdinand doesn’t engage with the highly stylized, noir<\/em>-ish component of Adams’s project, and that an ostensibly literate, informed gent like Ferguson apparently doesn’t even see it.<\/p>\n In short, like Adams’s subjects, Ferdinand and Ferguson and their commenters\u00a0come to this debate as na\u00effs (though, in their cases, faux-na\u00effs). A<\/em>nd while I find\u00a0some sociological value in having access to the spontaneous responses to Adams’s\u00a0pictures of people both unfamiliar with what those in the field see as the core issues and lacking as\u00a0reference points even the best-known relevant projects, I’d take more seriously the considered opinions of those who’ve engaged with issues of documentary on a professional level\u00a0\u2014 practitioners, picture editors, critics, historians, curators.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n Robert Flaherty, “Nanook of the North” (1922), title<\/p><\/div>\n Less surprisingly, those who find these comments of mine upsetting demonstrate little to no awareness of the energetic discourse\u00a0around documentary practice in the lens-based media that stretches back at least to the controversies over the work and methods of Peter Henry Emerson in his projects about rural England\u00a0from the 1880s, Edward S. Curtis’s\u00a0North American Indian<\/em> opus initiated in 1906, and\u00a0Robert Flaherty’s classic 1922 film\u00a0Nanook of the North<\/em>. They cite no parallel projects in any of the lens-based media in re such issues as insider\u00a0vs.\u00a0outsider status and the consequences thereof, long-term engagement with particular communities, or the imposition of directorial strategies and extreme stylization on\u00a0the raw material before the lens. They appear unable to separate the contents of the imagery from its content, the “about” from the “of,” conflating the two \u2014 the most elementary trap into which response to photographs can fall.<\/p>\n They also seem unaware of the extensive literature that has accumulated around ethnography, visual anthropology, visual sociology, and documentary photography, film, and video \u2014 the writings of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (click here for a pdf download<\/a> of their classic\u00a0Balinese Character<\/em>; you’ll have to wait a while for it to load), John Collier, Jr.<\/a>,\u00a0Paul Byers<\/a>, Sol Worth<\/a>, Jay Ruby<\/a>, Edmund Snow Carpenter<\/a>, Howard S. Becker<\/a>, et al.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n For those who will wonder (some always do) whether my response to Shelby Lee Adams’s work springs from some professional or personal animus, I can answer unequivocally: No.<\/p>\n At mealtimes and after class sessions we mixed and mingled with Adams and his group, as well as the instructors and participants in the other workshops from the summer program. Adams and I chatted a bit \u2014 he struck me as a perfectly likeable guy \u2014 but didn’t hang out. Each evening, one of the workshop presenters offered a lecture about his or her work, open to all the faculty and attendees from all workshops, so we all got to hear a bit about the different workshop leaders.<\/p>\n Shelby Lee Adams, “Appalachian Legacy” (1998), cover<\/p><\/div>\n I’d gone through several of Adams’s books at that point, had read his texts in them, and had seen one of his exhibitions, but for one reason or another had never reviewed or otherwise commented on his work for any publication. Few of my students knew of him. They constituted a real mix: an economist from southeast Asia (there because his wife had enrolled in another workshop, and mine seemed the closest to his interests); several photo teachers; several photographers; a maker of artist’s books who used photographic imagery; a teacher of 20th-century art history; a poet and fiction writer. All of them adults, at least a few years out of school. Some had come a long distance, some from nearby \u2014 and Penland is in Appalachia.<\/p>\n Without saying anything about Adams or his work, on the afternoon before his lecture\u00a0I assigned it to them, as an opportunity to correlate what someone says about his or her work with the work itself, and as a way of sorting out response to the person from response to the work. (We’d discussed these problems for the critic in our previous sessions.) I indicated that we’d gather after breakfast the next morning to talk about it.<\/p>\n Shelby Lee Adams, “Appalachian Portraits” (1993), cover<\/p><\/div>\n When we did, without offering any opinion of my own, I simply opened the floor to them. Out came a flood, surprisingly consistent given their diverse backgrounds. Without exception, they experienced a profound disconnect between Adams’s verbal contextualization of his pictures \u2014 fairly close to his commentary on them in the Baichwal film and elsewhere \u2014 and the photographs themselves (many of the images, though not all).<\/p>\n I felt a certain relief, because I’d experienced\u00a0that same duality all through the previous evening’s slideshow with Adams’s voiceover and the later q&a. This photographer’s pictures did not synch with the motives and purposes and understandings he claimed for them. The fact that he struck me (and my workshop attendees) as absolutely sincere in his assertions made the combination all the more problematic. Because, unless you bought his verbal narrative, the pictures told another story, and none of us\u00a0could reconcile the two.<\/p>\n The Mean Truth of Picturing<\/strong><\/p>\n In\u00a0“Photography and Place,”<\/a> a May 2012 post at his blog Conscientious<\/a> responding to a different controversy over a different set of photos of Appalachia, Joerg Colberg\u00a0makes this useful observation:<\/p>\n “We must not overburden photography with something it cannot do \u2014 providing us with an accurate portrayal of anything. Instead, we must acknowledge the maker\u2019s hand, and we should talk about its role \u2014 and our reactions.”<\/em><\/p>\n Or, as I put it back in 1987:<\/p>\n “[W]e must think of every photograph as a form of collaboration between subject, photographer, and medium. The last of these operates subcutaneously \u2014 beneath the skin of the imagery; most commonly, it calls as little attention to itself as possible, seeking no credit for the final results, even if in fact it dictates them outright. The more immediate, observable transaction is between subject and photographer; it is in this dialogue \u2014 sometimes contestual and sometimes cooperative \u2014 that control of the final image is negotiated.<\/em><\/p>\n “In that bargaining the photographer almost always has the upper hand. What I mean by this goes well beyond the fact that some subjects are extremely pliable, perhaps even helpless, insensate, inanimate. Any photographer worth his\/her salt \u2014 that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagisitic bent \u2014 can make virtually anything ‘look good.’ Which means, of course, that she or he can make anything look ‘bad’ \u2014 or look just about any way at all.<\/em><\/p>\n “After all, that is the real work of photography:\u00a0<\/em>making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image. For photographs do not ‘show how things look,’ since there is no one way that anything looks. Every thing has an infinitude of potential appearances, a multiplicity of aspects. What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look \u2014 at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.<\/em><\/p>\n “The photographer, then, is an active partner (most often the dominant one) in the construction of any photographic version of the world.”<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014 from “The Image in Question: Further Notes on the Directorial Mode,” reprinted in my 1998 collection of essays,\u00a0Depth of Field<\/em>.<\/p>\n I’ve done no systematic research on the critical response to Adams’s work, and don’t plan to; his project\u00a0doesn’t engage\u00a0me in any way that requires such investigation. But I’m certainly interested in what readers of this blog have to say on the set of\u00a0issues raised by his images\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and by Baichwal’s excellent film, which manages the difficult feat of putting those questions on the table without leading the viewer to any particular answers.<\/p>\n (Part\u00a01<\/a>\u00a0I\u00a02<\/a>\u00a0I 3<\/a> I 4)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Without exception, my workshop participants at the Penland School of Crafts experienced a profound disconnect between Shelby Lee Adams’s verbal contextualization of his pictures \u2014 fairly close to his commentary on them in the Baichwal film and elsewhere \u2014 and the photographs themselves. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[992,11],"tags":[988,991,994,628,989],"class_list":["post-19628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-photography-2","category-film-reviews","tag-jennifer-baichwal","tag-marilyn-ferdinand","tag-mark-lynn-ferguson","tag-shelby-lee-adams","tag-the-true-meaning-of-pictures","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\""The](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Nightofthehunter_1956_poster.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Jennifer](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/Baichwal_True_Meaning_of_Pictures.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Robert](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/nanook-of-the-north-1922_title.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Penland](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Penland_logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a>Adams and I have crossed paths only once \u2014 at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in August 1998, when he and I taught concurrent workshops in Penland’s summer photography program. He took his students out on field trips, afterward critiquing their work; I called my workshop “Writing to\/from Photographs,” and put my participants through exercises in writing with great precision about found photographs, while also exploring a range of other issues in criticism.<\/p>\n![\"Shelby](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Adams_Appalachian_Legacy_1998_cover.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Shelby](\"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Shelby_Lee_Adams_Appalachian_Portraits_1993_cover.jpg\")
<\/a>