The Spirit of the People | movie | 2024 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

Photographer Shelby Lee Adams reflects on his life-long journey to seek out identity by capturing portraits of Appalachi | dG1fVkxrRFZnQThSd3c

Transcript

00:00My name is Shelby Lee Adams. I'm actually born and raised in Hazard, Kentucky and Letcher County,

00:20Kentucky, the eastern part of the mountains area. I went to art school to study photography,

00:29which is not typical for my background. In art school I saw the work of the FSA

00:36photographers, the Farm Security Administration, and I was taught in school or told that the history

00:43of photography was inclusive of that genre, but it wasn't. I felt it was still ongoing, at least in

00:53my area, and I started getting interested in photographing documentary. People like I like

01:01to photograph exist everywhere, but in the mountains of Kentucky I had access through

01:08my uncle being a country doctor, through my own families. My grandparents would introduce

01:14me to the mountain people who were very rather different than say the middle-class townsfolk,

01:19and there was sometimes a prejudice against the poor people. These people are the same day and night,

01:27and that's really the natural look that I'm trying to get. And the mountain people of eastern Kentucky

01:34that I'm photographing all have an unusual distinctive look, and the culture itself is disappearing, so I

01:43feel it's important that it be documented. When I started out in the 70s, I wasn't trying at all to

01:51be a photographer of the hill people or the mountain people or the hollers. I was just photographing people

01:58that I knew that I thought were interesting. And so my work has grown over the years by word of mouth and

02:07associating one shoot to another, to one holler to another, and one family to another family. And so the work is

02:14continuous growth. And I hope it continues even after my death. The work will live on.