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Reviews
From
the book’s jacket:
Rob Amberg's gifted with a wisdom unusual in a documentary
photographer. He knows his pictures, even ringed with written
text and recorded songs and stories, can’t say everything
he feels for his subject. Truth doesn’t sit there on
the surface of the picture, but the picture can lead you to
a glint of truth. It’s in what pictures leave unseen
and words unsaid that Sodom Laurel comes to life in this magnificent
ensemble of images and voices. No wonder Amberg chooses Saint-Exupery’s
wise and mystic words as epigraph: “it is only with
the heart that one can see rightly.” From the unearthly
opening picture -- shaggy silhouetted work horse stepping
gently through snow on the heels of its shadowy keeper toward
a makeshift wooden gate -- Amberg always sees rightly and
pitilessly. He lays before us a vista of place and people,
mountain people and tobacco culture, not just to delight the
eye but to invite praise. A luminous spirit of uncommon folk
at labor, play, music-making, and love envelopes this beautiful
work in an aura of strangeness.
--Alan Trachtenberg |
Rob
Amberg’s images have the same durability and tenacity
as the lives they depict. He is trusted well enough to be there,
up close, when the women embrace in affection or when the farmer
pauses in the heat. And Amberg does not betray that trust. What
we see is sympathetic, not sentimental, simple but not facile.
Amberg makes real what is found on the pages of the Southern
novel.
--Sally Mann
These photographs are suffused with a lyrical sense of beauty,
rhythm, and the dignity of light. You come away with a deep
understanding of the hardships and glories that made up Dellie
Norton’s life, her community, and her adventures in this
world. And Amberg’s photographs of Junior transcend the
document, even go beyond everyday life, and arrive at a new
visionary depiction of the shared experience of being human.
--John Cohen
This story is not always a pretty one - it has its share of
pain and conflict - but it captures the full dimensions of life
in Sodom Laurel, and by doing so, it reminds us of the warmth,
strength, and compassion that also marked the lives of the people
who lived there. This book reminds us of the dignity and nobility
that lie in ordinary places and ordinary people, without a trace
of condescension.
--Bill Malone
Rob Amberg captures the daily life of this community faithfully,
scrupulously, beautifully. This book is not only a priceless
record of a vanishing way of life: it’s a work of art.
It deserves every prize out there.
--Lee Smith
Reviews:
I have to admit I expected similar caricatures of my mountain
cousins when I began to hear about Rob Amberg’s book,
“Sodom Laurel Album,” just published by the UNC
Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies
at Duke. But, I could not have been more wrong. I started reading
the text and admiring the wonderful photographs - and I was
soon entranced by these people’s lives as if I were sitting
on the porch beside them, listening as they told their stories.
I cannot recommend this book too highly. It is one of the most
admirable ventures into mountain culture ever published.
--Perry Deane Young, The Chapel Hill Herald
Rob Amberg has managed to produce an extraordinary account that
speaks volumes not only about the people of Madison County,
but gives us a caring and unforgettable portrait of Dellie Norton,
an extraordinary woman that lived a life filled with kindness
and insight. Sodom Laurel Album is a truly amazing work with
a vision that approaches genius.
--Robert Segedy, The Independent
Amberg’s photographs didn’t come by this relaxed,
open quality easily. In the preface to Sodom Laurel Album, he
shows that he’s thought long and hard enough about documentary
photography to understand some of its shortcomings, especially
the dangers posed by stereotypes - both building upon already-existing
stereotypes and helping to create new ones -- and photography’s
inherent superficiality. The way in which the book’s pictures
and texts supplement one another is proof of intelligent engagement
with these issues. Sodom Laurel Album avoids stereotypes by
sometimes surprising us and occasionally even allowing image
and text to contradict one another, and it achieves greater
depth than many photographic documentaries by allowing words
and pictures to work together in partnership rather than having
one or the other dominate. Amberg also writes about how his
understanding of the project grew over the years, making a slow
evolution from “objective” documentary study to
more subjective personal narrative. Here, too, Sodom Laurel
Album provides more food for thought than many documentaries.
--David Wharton, The Southern Register
Although I have never met Rob Amberg or the subjects of his
book, Sodom Laurel Album, there is a ring of familiarity to
his images and his words. As an Appalachian native, I know him.
I know his subjects. He is me. They are us. I am as familiar
with his subjects as I am my own past.
Sodom Laurel Album presents this rural world of North Carolina
both as a portal to those who are unfamiliar with rural Appalachian
life and as a reflection to those of us who have grown up in,
and been molded by, such lives. Amberg seems to first approach
his work as a portal to a life he knew little about but soon
discovers the reflections glaring back at him.
Seldom does one feel the presence of the photographer in this
body of work, resulting in a classic social documentary where
classic compositions pull us into the portals and reflections
of Amberg’s work.
--Malcolm J. Wilson, Journal of Appalachian Studies
In the preface, Amberg acknowledges that Sodom Laurel Album
is as much a record of his process of personal evolution as
an exploration of how another group of people lived. That colored
position is possibly what gives Sodom Laurel Album its powerful
honesty.
--Leigh Ann Henion, Avery Mountain Times
You will not have seen photographs like Amberg’s before.
These images capture something difficult to describe in words.
Intimacy? Complexity? Warmth? Even the combination is inadequate.
Unconsciously, I found myself studying many of the photographs,
imagining stories behind them, allowing myself to be transported
through layers of emotion into the lost world they reveal. I
would not have though it possible.
The unrivaled power and fascination of these photographs must
derive in part from the fact that Amberg became a real part
of the community and family he photographed. Sodom Laurel Album
is what happens when one of the country’s finest photographers
spends two decades with a handful of people. Becomes a neighbor.
Works with them in the tobacco fields. Eats and sleeps with
them. Listens to their stories and participates in the banter
about daily life. Experiences both the kindness and pettiness
of the community. Attends weddings and funerals. Passes time
on the front porch. Then, lovingly crafts a book of photographs,
reminiscences, and music to tell a rich and personal story.
How unusual these days to hold a book whose size, layout, typeface
-- everything down to the texture of the hardcover - has been
thought through and woven together with such craftsmanship.
Sodom Laurel Album is a stunning achievement from top to bottom.
--Cary Fowler, Southern Cultures
Until recently, Sodom Laurel remained almost unknown to most
Americans. And this is one reason why Rob’s book is so
important, for here we have a record of a world that had all
but vanished elsewhere, one told in Dellie’s own words
and in Rob’s splendid photographs. There is no sentimentality
here, only truthful words and truthful images.
--Michael Yates, Musical Traditions
Many “outsiders” have visited the Appalachian United
States, with a variety of motives and preconceptions. To this
day, stereotype tends to dominate reality. With Sodom Laurel
Album, Rob Amberg invites us once again to the region. He is
one outsider who has decided to stay, respectful of “them
days” Dellie describes with nostalgia, but part of the
contemporary scene, which now includes television sets, computers,
and a new highway. Amberg’s portrait of Sodom Laurel at
the beginning of the 21st century brings us face to face with
one rural community, steeped in traditional ways, as it finds
itself, inevitably, on the brink of change.
--James Hardin, The Library of Congress Information Bulletin
"Sodom" or "Sodom Laurel" is the town nickname
of Revere, North Carolina, an isolated community of hill-country
tobacco farmers, apparently so-named by a preacher who came
upon early encampments of loggers in the area. Photographer
and folklorist Amberg focuses on a single member of the community,
the musician and storyteller Dellie Chandler Norton (1898-1993),
whom he first met in 1975. He chronicles his own experiences
with Norton, her adopted son Junior, and other members of the
family, and with the difficulties of independent tobacco farming.
Amberg's beautiful yet stark and unassuming b&w photos form
the book's core: hill roads; huge tobacco leaves growing, being
harvested (usually now by Mexican laborers) and hanging to dry
in sheds; Dellie Norton performing at gatherings or presiding
over her porch; Junior's bizarre changes of clothing and demeanor
to suit various occasions and community negotiations; the stark
interiors of various dwellings. The photos are accompanied by
transcribed narratives by Norton, Junior, and others, and by
Amberg's own observations; most are grim yet immediate and compelling.
A 20-track CD with more than an hour of hill country music by
Norton and others rounds things out. An exemplary example of
regional documentary, the project exhibits care and concern
throughout, and will draw in outsiders from any locale, particularly
anyone who loves Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.
--Publisher’s Weekly |
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