By SARAH MILROY, The Globe and Mail
September 12, 2002

original source-http://www.docurama.com/press/True%20Meaning%20interview%20w%20Shelby.htm

"When it comes to ethics, documentary photography may be the most vexed of artistic media. By definition, it involves a relationship between the vulnerable participant in history -- the starvation-wracked sharecropper's wife with her wind-worn face; the Spanish revolutionary, reeling from the bullet wound on his lonely hilltop; the seated, self-immolating monk, engulfed in flames -- and the photographer, whose fortune is distinct from that of his subject.

As the acclaimed American documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark puts it: "It's a form of voyeurism. . . . I really feel that the act of taking someone's picture is in a sense exploitative. No matter what."

For documentary photographers, then, self-scrutiny comes with the territory, and the better you are, the more lacerating that self-scrutiny becomes. Take the case of American photographer Shelby Lee Adams, whose most recent pictures documenting the remote rural communities of Appalachia are showing this month at Toronto's Stephen Bulger Gallery. He is also the subject of a sensitive and probing film by Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal -- The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia, which premiered on Saturday as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. "What is it that fascinates us about watching someone else's misfortune?" Baichwal asks. It is now 2½ years since she began the project and she is still puzzling over this fundamental aspect of human nature.

Over beer and popcorn in a downtown bar in Toronto, Adams permitted himself a short laugh. "You have to admit, it's pretty remarkable," he says in his Southern drawl. "I have had people come up to me and hug me after seeing my work. And I have had people spit at me. If a photograph can achieve that range of response -- well, I think that's really something."

But the laughter is short-lived. Adams comes across by a man hounded by his own demons and bedevilled by the criticism of exploitation that is often levelled at his now 30-year-long photographic project in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The sting of these criticisms is sharper because Adams -- who has nine years of university education under his belt and an exhibition résumé as long as your arm -- is photographing his own roots, a community he has been accused of betraying..Adams's famous hog-killing photograph, taken of the Napier family in 1990, was entirely staged. .."

read the full story here http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/special/filmfestival/2002/news/20020912adams.html

see photos at http://www.edelmangallery.com/adams.htm and http://www.yossimilogallery.com/artists/shel_lee_adam/