The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia, 2002 (Grade B)

Director" Jennifer Baichwal
Topic Photography - manipulation of images

sez says: this explores some heavy philosophical terrain. Shelby Lee Adams, a photographer, who grew up in Appalachia, takes photos of people in the far-back hollers of Kentucky -- and presents those photos to the world via galley showings and books. He says he is just presenting these people to the world, as they are, and he is not exploiting them in any way. The film talks to many of the people who have had their pictures in his books,  and only a few have any problem at all with the pictures or with him.  But the pictures do, undeniably, perpetrate stereotypes about inbred simpletons who are immersed in poverty and misery.  The people in the photos are more complex than the pictures--and the pictures are sometimes rather shocking.  Did the photographer intentionally make the pictures shocking to sell the photos?  Are the photos art, or documentary materials?   Critics point out that he posed the pictures--and in so doing he makes them something other than documents--one man called them "Shelby Lee Adam's Picture Poems" -- and had no problem with them as 'visual poems' but stood firm against their being accepted as documentary photos. There are a lot of voices in this...and questions about morality, ethics, cultural elitism, what is art and more..are churning around the discussions. It is well done. (Grade B)