Excerpts: We Are Still One People
November 2013

The New Bicycle, 2004

My photography over time presents our people in a formal, and perhaps a more studied way. We live our lives, recalling and reflecting upon important events. In their grit and determination, my friends express themselves, the invisible confidence that flows between us imprints upon the photographs.
—Shelby Lee Adams

“People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.”

—John Steinbeck

“East of Eden”

David, 1978, Roxanne

Shelby photographing David and another child, Roxanne, 1978

Photo made by Mark Karpenski

Polaroids from David's 1978 photo session.

David, Bad to the Bone, 1985

Ronnie holding Jeremy, 2008

Newsome Boy, 1989, Polaroids

         Is it not one’s socio-political status in life that grants ones rated visibility as something more important? In portraiture and human representation, faced with the inconsistency or incompleteness of a person’s form we feel entitled to say dispassionately, that face is ugly and unimportant, especially when one comes from poverty. If given a chance, cannot any form of humanity be elevated, redeemed and transformed by a faithful artistic portrayal?

                                       —Shelby Lee Adams

Kizzie, 2008


Janet Malcom's take on Agee/Evans, Let us Now Praise Famous Men.

       "This has always been the problem with Agee's book: the pictures and the text don't agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers' lives. How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it? Agee cries. "Don't listen to him," the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. "He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It's not as bad as he says."

       In all probability, Walker Evans himself believed nothing of the kind. The disparity between the testimony of his photographs and that of Agee's text comes not out of a disagreement between the two witnesses about what they saw but out of photography's inadequacy as a describer of how things are. The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is. 

                                                     —Janet Malcolm

Larry and Billie, 2003

Bubba Road

Abandon, 1994

Printed 2024

Owsley C0. Man, 1994

Printed 2024

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