Preview
THE TRUE MEANING OF PICTURES
Featuring Shelby Lee Adams
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal
Wednesday, March 26
Murray Fraser Hall 162 (U of C)
Deedle-deedle, deedle, deedle, dee. Dueling banjos should no longer signify what they used to, according to a new documentary about Kentucky-born photographer Shelby Lee Adams and his infamous portraits of Appalachian mountain people.
The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia is an thoroughly engaging film, largely because it questions the way that Adams’s images, and images in general, are both created and interpreted. Adams is a controversial figure in modern photography – some accuse him of perpetuating stereotypes that suggest lower class people in the American South are shiftless, inbred hillbillies. In his defense, Adams says he’s just documenting the lives and culture of the people who live in the hollers near where he grew up. The True Meaning of Pictures considers Adams’s claim, asking if his work is documentary, artistic or, more complicatedly, both – and what each designation means to the subjects of the photographs and anyone who sees them.
"The reason that I was drawn to Shelby’s work is that I think about issues of representation all the time," says Jennifer Baichwal, the film’s director. "All of his photographs immediately brought up questions for me because they’re very compelling pictures, but they’re also disturbing pictures."
Disturbing, indeed. Adams’s photographs tend to focus on images of people who appear to be living in extreme poverty. Baichwal notes that at gallery showings in other parts of the U.S., the typical response from viewers is shock that people are "still living like this." She also mentions that the history of documentary photography can be described as a perpetual gaze downward. That is, the photographer, and therefore the viewer, is usually in a position of power with respect to the subjects of the work.
"What is this pornography of squalour that we have in our culture, in Western culture, where middle-class people are drawn to looking at representations of people who are poorer than them?" asks Baichwal rhetorically. "Why is that fascinating to them, to us?"
Commendably, the film examines many facets of the issue, incorporating interviews with Adams, the subjects themselves and art critics like A.D. Coleman, who is opposed to the way Adams characterizes his own work. Interestingly, the subjects, with a couple of exceptions, express their approval of the photographs, while Coleman suggests, in a patronizing manner, that the subjects do not have the visual sophistication to understand the photographs, or at least the way they are interpreted by people outside of Eastern Kentucky.
Viewers of the film may find Coleman offensively arrogant, particularly since The True Meaning of Pictures goes to such great lengths to show us the lives of Adams’s subjects in detail. As we’re introduced to the Napier, Riddle and Childers families – whom Adams has been photographing for many years – we begin to see that they regard him as their clan photographer. Within the context of their lives, his pictures are their family portraits.
Baichwal says that she and producer Nick de Pencier (who also shot the film) were trying to create a dichotomy between people who only have the photographs to look at, like Coleman, and those who have relationships, however mediated, with the subjects.
"What was interesting for me, going from just looking at the photographs to spending time and developing relationships with a lot of these subjects, was an arc from voyeurism into empathy," says Baichwal. "When I first saw the pictures, I would think, you know, ‘These people are totally other to me.’ But by the end of our experience, and the number of weeks we spent in Kentucky shooting and spending time with these families, it was a completely different experience and the photographs were different because we knew those people and they were our friends."
Of course, if one’s interpretation of Adams’s work changes after getting to know the subjects, that might indicate that there is something to Coleman’s argument – he says that if the photographs are presented as Adams’s Southern Gothic poetry of Appalachia, that’s one thing, but if they are meant to be documentary photos of Appalachia, that’s another. That’s a polemic that Adams resents – he says his calling is to document life, but as we see in the film, his photos are often posed and use complicated lighting set-ups that give them a theatrical quality, so we’re led to question his methods and practice as well.
Before seeing the film, we might characterize Adams’s pictures as grotesquely beautiful. Afterward, they’re still beautiful, though not really grotesque. The film leaves us pondering this transformation in ourselves, and questioning, as the title suggests, the true meaning of pictures.
"It’s not meant to come to a conclusion about Shelby either way because I myself am still ambivalent about the questions and the work even after spending this much time on it," says Baichwal. "I wanted to raise questions without trying to answer them." |
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