About

Shelby Lee Adams was born in 1950 in Kentucky. He grew up in the Appalachians at a time when poverty in the region is often portrayed as a caricature. What Adams and his people regret. At the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he studied, he then discovered the archives of the Farm Security Administration on the Great Depression. He then sprang the idea of working with rural families in his home community, alongside his orders for magazines and the courses he gives at the university.
Between 1974 and 2010, he returns every summer to this land of mines and small-scale agriculture that he …