The True Meaning of Picture: Shelby Lee Adams

"I'm pushing you, the viewer, and challenging you. That's why I'm in there with the camera six inches away from Selena's face. I think you need to he confronted with that. By getting in there with the camera, by creating some distortions, I'm hoping to make everyone think. What is our job here as a human being? Stop making judgments and experience life. I'm experiencing this environment. I'm trying to share with you, in an intimate way, that experience." Shelby Lee Adams

       Jenniffer Baichwal’s The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia is an exploration into the controversial and to me beautiful work of the American photographer Shelby Lee Adams, especially his photographs taken in Appalachia Kentucky, and the people who live there. True Meaning takes us on what essentially is a tour of many different landscapes led by Adams, using his photographs and the audio and video recordings taken while he photographed his series as a starting point. During the movie you learn that Adams has been filming the people in the hollows of Kentucky, who are all mostly living in abject poverty, for over thirty years.

       Most of us probably look at Adams photographs and all we see are hillbillies, I like the distinction Adams makes in the documentary about the people he photographs being his friends not hillbillies he even refers to them as his people. I think that the interpretation varies on the person viewing the photographs, but I think that Adams photographs of the Appalachian people are his way of trying to get people to look past the judgments we all have, and see who the people he is photographing really are.  Adams has also been criticized for lighting and arranging the people in his photograph. I don’t there is anything wrong with lighting a photograph to get the mood and feel the photographer is trying to accomplish. I think Adams is able to incorporate lighting and staging and still manages to show the subject in an unbiased and truthful manner.

My goal that I want to reach through my essay is to show the conditions in which these kids are living in and show the facilities and people who are trying to help them. I want to show these kids in their own environment’s and I want to show the facilities that allow these kids a chance and a different way to live. This is different from how I usually work, I usually pose people and create the environments around them. But I want these photographs to be real and tell a true story. I’m stepping out of my box for this one so we will see how it goes.