It's a Rainin' on the Bypath

May 9, 2016 Rob Amberg

Marshall Bypass, Madison County, NC 2016

Spring Pasture

May 2, 2016 Rob Amberg

The light this time of year.
It's something to behold.
Something to be blessed.
At once bright and deep.
Complex in its hews.
So hard to focus.
So easy to lose oneself in
its hypnotic self.

Doe Branch Ink

April 26, 2016 Rob Amberg

Looking forward to this workshop with my long-time buddy and work partner, Charlie Thompson, in an absolutely stunning location. Not to mention that Jim and Deborah are the best hosts one can ask for.

A Week of Images, Ideas, and Inspiration

Sunday June 12th to Saturday June 18th - register now!

We're pleased to announce that long-time collaborators Rob Amberg and Charlie Thompson—with deference to Agee & Evans and other documentary teams who have worked to bring stories to light—will be at Doe Branch Ink to lead a workshop on documentary fieldwork. There are a few spaces left, so be sure to claim your spot today.

Not so much a technical workshop as a discussion on the documentary fieldwork process, Amberg and Thompson will lead discussions about how to conceive and plan projects, meet and cultivate collaborations with interlocutors in the field, collaborate with other artists without coming to blows(!), and take your work to larger audiences as articles, books, exhibits, and more.

Rob and Charlie encourage participants to bring your own ideas and projects to the workshop, and they'll ensure plenty of time for reflection and deepening your work. They plan to workshop their own project in progress: a retrospective on their 30 years of work in rural America, on farm advocacy and the culture of agriculture, including the portion of their work sponsored by Willie Nelson's FarmAid.

They'll also organize field trips to local sites, photo talks, film screenings, and focused discussions of the leaders’ work will make for a full and rewarding week. You can read more about their workshop and our other spring / summer offerings at our new website.

About the Artists
Rob Amberg is an award-winning photographer and writer who has made Madison County, NC his adopted home for going on four decades. His books include Sodom Laurel Album and The New Road: I-26 and the Footprint of Progress in Appalachia. His photographs are part of the permanent collection of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Charlie Thompson, a writer, filmmaker, and photographer is a member of the Anthropology Department at Duke University. His most recent books include Border Odyssey: Travels along the US/Mexican Divide, an ethnography and memoir about his 2,000 mile journey through the borderlands, and Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World, an inquiry into his ancestors' roots in Franklin County, Virginia.

Yours,

Deborah and Jim

At the Engagement Party, Wheeling, WV

April 25, 2016 Rob Amberg

A Community Coverlet

April 14, 2016 Rob Amberg

Quilt Presentation, PawPaw, Madison County, NC 1983

Back in the olden days,
(Oh, how I love being able to say that)
new people moving into Madison County
began a tradition of making and gifting quilts.
For weddings, or new babies, or friendship.
Receiving a quilt meant a certain acceptance.
An embrace.
You were part of the community.
A member of the tribe.

It's a tradition that continues with young people today.
And I think, how rare is that?
Except in places like ours.
Small, close knit, and hands on.
Welcoming.

In this photograph Vicki Skemp, aka Vicki Lane, is
thanking her neighbors and friends for the
20th Anniversary Wedding quilt
presented to her and her husband John.
It's a Sister's Choice pattern,
organized by Vicky Owen and Fay Skemp Uffelman.
It was a potluck day, of course.
This one held at Wayne and Fay Uffelman's farm on Paw Paw Creek.

For Governor McCrory

April 11, 2016 Rob Amberg

Our two-seater, useable by all, no questions asked, no ID required, no confusion, no stupidity. Governor, quit pretending you know what's best for our state, and for us. You don't. Do us a favor, gather your minions and just leave in the dark of night. You should be ashamed.
We are.

. . . No Evil

April 5, 2016 Rob Amberg

photo+craft

March 21, 2016 Rob Amberg

photo+craft, hosted by Warren Wilson College, is an unprecedented community arts event happening March 31—April 3, 2016 at multiple venues in downtown Asheville and the River Arts District. Through exhibitions, talks, film and panel discussions, this cross-disciplinary festival explores visual and material culture in the 21st century by examining intersections between photography and craft.

Included in the notable list of presenters is my old friend, Harvey Wang. I first met Harvey in Madison County in 1976 when he was doing a project for a senior project. At photo+craft Harvey will be showing and speaking about his latest film, From Darkroom to Daylight, an exploration of the evolution of photography with twenty masters of the medium.

http://www.darkroom2daylight.com/

http://photocraftavl.com/

As part of this event, I will be showing photographs with Asheville photographer, Tim Barnwell, in the Revolve Arts Space in the Cotton Mill Studio at 122 Riverside Drive in Asheville. The exhibit is titled Hands On and includes work Tim and I have made over the last forty years.

http://www.revolveavl.org/hands-on

Josh Copus Firing His Kiln, Lower Brush Creek, Madison County, NC 2015- Hands On, Revolve Gallery, Asheville, NC — Josh Copus Firing His Kiln, Lower Brush Creek, Madison County, NC 2015
- *Hands On,* Revolve Gallery, Asheville, NC

So May I Introduce to You . . .

March 16, 2016 Rob Amberg

. . . My friend, the irresistible and ever jubilant Cathy Guthrie.

Cargile Branch, Madison County, NC 2011.

A Walk's Treasures

March 14, 2016 Rob Amberg

Paw Paw Creek, at Anderson Branch, 030916

One of my walks last week yielded a bounty - a mini fridge, a shop vac and TV, a clothes dryer, bedsprings, and should you be hungry, a rotting goat. It's easy to be angry at this wanton disregard for our environment and the accompanying belief that the land is big enough to absorb whatever we throw at it. And I am, angry.

But I also remember a time many years ago when I first started hanging out with Dellie Norton. This one particular day we went to visit one of her relatives - a short drive and longer walk into a deep holler, following a boldly flowing creek. A small, broad valley with a patch of waist-high tobacco alongside a significant garden, a log cabin with wrap-around porch and smoke rising from the chimney - it couldn't have been more idyllic. We forded the creek, stepping gingerly on wobbly rocks and there we came face to face with the household dump site - an enormous pile of milk jugs, disposable diapers, tin cans, clothes, tires, and appliances - all spilling from the road and into the creek.

The very idea of trash was a relatively new concept for people like Dellie. Her's was not a throw-away culture. Use and reuse was what she lived by. But the arrival of modern culture to the mountains brought plastic, more packaging, and more waste. The thought of hauling it to a landfill and paying money to throw it away made no sense when it could simply be thrown in the creek where the next heavy rain would wash it from sight.

Now, some forty years later, I want to believe people surely know better, that we've learned that plastic and electronics don't simply vanish in the soil, that tires don't recycle in creeks. But evidence from my walks says, "no, we've learned nothing." Makes we wonder if it's not my anger that's misplaced.

That I should think instead of A Boxspring's Memory. Bits of cloth, cotton stuffing, invoices, a pair of intact panty hose, lacking only a good washing. And stories. Stories from the boxspring itself, of bouncing and creaking, of rust and decay. And stories from the owners of such things - My life with Boxsprings. And maybe from the imaginations and memories of people who see these pictures. It's what pictures do.

Hero - Cedric Chatterley

March 8, 2016 Rob Amberg

If any of you happen to be in Sioux Falls, SD, or anywhere remotely close, in the next month this is absolutely the exhibit to see. Cedric is a good buddy, but in my mind he is one of the premier social documentary photographers working today. Additionally, his handmade, large format cameras are works of art. To my knowledge, he is the only person in the country making these cameras. Cedric's work will be housed at the Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Room at Duke University and he usually stops at our house on his frequent trips to North Carolina. Often, we get the first look at his new cameras - a 4x5 mounted in a horse's skull, another inside of a squeeze box, another an ode to the blues musician Honeyboy Edwards. This will be a significant exhibit by a most significant artist.

AUGUSTANA PERFORMING AND VISUAL ARTS PRESENTS:

'Reciprocity: Handmade Cameras and Photographs by Cedric Chatterley'

Event Details

The Eide/Dalrymple Gallery's latest exhibit, "Reciprocity: Handmade Cameras and Photographs by Cedric Chatterley" will be on display from Thursday, March 11, toSaturday, April 23. A gallery reception is scheduled for 7-9 p.m., Friday, March 11, with the artist's talk set to begin at 7:30 p.m. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.Monday through Friday; 1 - 4 p.m. on Saturday

Sculptural handmade cameras and photographs by Sioux Falls artist Cedric Chatterley are featured in this exhibition. Chatterley began his career in photography in the late 1980s, simultaneously working on long-term personal documentary projects and also as a hired photographer documenting traditional artists, musicians and craftspeople for various state arts agencies throughout the United States.

In 2006, Chatterley began building his own large format cameras, utilizing his advanced skills in welding and woodworking. He found that the traditional artists he had been documenting over the decades influenced him profoundly, and he began to ask various artists and friends to collaborate with him in producing sculptural cameras that he would then use to take photographs. This exhibition will display — for the first time — 17 of Chatterley’s cameras and 50 photographs.

We look forward to having you join us on Friday!

Sunday Fog

February 22, 2016 Rob Amberg

Evening Meal

February 10, 2016 Rob Amberg

Assholes abound

February 7, 2016 Rob Amberg

Anderson Branch, Madison County, NC 2016

I just want to give a big shout out thank you to the asshole who tossed these two TVs off the side of the road on Anderson Branch. Now, should I get bored on my walk, I can stop and imagine the inanity I could be watching if I only had a half-mile long extension cord with me. Throw your shit in your own backyard, or better yet, the landfill, but not in mine.

Sheep in Shadow and Sun

February 3, 2016 Rob Amberg

Slicker than . . .

January 30, 2016 Rob Amberg

Seven days post storm, 57 degrees today, 60 tomorrow and patches of our road are still slicker than bat shit, which, I might add, is closely related to bat shit crazy.

Onward

January 21, 2016 Rob Amberg

Kate and Rob, PawPaw, Madison County, NC 1993

Change abounds and I expect to alter the pace of my blogging. Not quitting, mind you, but definitely slowing for the time being. I'll leave you for now with this photograph of Kate and me. I carried this print with me on my trip, tucked in my notebook, where I could find it and look at it when I wanted, or needed.

January 13, 2016 Rob Amberg

I leave Chaco buoyant, my clarity matching the crisp and bright of northern New Mexico. As Charley predicted, Chaco Canyon has been the perfect end point for this trip of mine, offering simplicity and reflection, even if just for a day. I sense I'm back where I started forty-odd years ago - leaving the Southwest; starting a new chapter; the same, but now accepted, mix of confidence and anxiety; heading to the same place, one I've called home for forty-two years. I know the task ahead - three long days of driving. It will not be slow. But it's time to be there.

I have one last visit to make, this one with Bill Tydeman and his family in Lubbock, Texas. Bill is an archivist with the library at Texas Tech University. When I first met him, he was the librarian at Mars Hill College in Madison County and had ideas of starting a photo archives that would focus on work from the mountain region of North Carolina. He began buying images from my Madison County work and later hired me to administer the archive. Bill, more than any one person, got me started and gave me confidence that my photographs had lasting value. It's important for me to see him.

Rest Area, Interstate 27, north of Lubbock

I'm not sure where, or why, I get off track, but somewhere in west Texas I miss a turn and it takes a while before I realize I've added 100 miles to my trip to Lubbock. I didn't want to be driving after dark, but I will be. I get to town late and in this very-easy-to-navigate place, with Bill's wife Leslie guiding me, I can't find their house. I'm confused, with no sense of direction, and when I find myself going the wrong way on a highway entrance ramp, I know I'm in trouble. I pull over and think slow, I think of this morning's raven, and it dawns on me I haven't eaten in a long while. My blood sugar.

Change is often hard to accept and much of my trip has been an effort to do just that, to surrender to time's passage. My friend is dealing with similar issues that for him are being played out with health problems, changes at work, a young wife and far younger son. But he's still doing vital work with a series of environmental writers and photographers, including authors Barry Lopez and John Lane. Our time together is the same as it has always been - talking, looking at photographs, exchanging ideas, encouraging. But the time is also different, changed as we both have aged, transitioning, opening new chapters. It's disquieting, but I leave with a phrase that's new to me, critical regionalism.

Bill Tydeman with Leslie, Brannen, and Asher, Lubbock, Texas — Bill Tydeman with Leslie, Brannen, and Asher, Lubbock, Texas

The next two days will be a gut check - about 650 miles a day, much of it on I-40, a trucker's paradise, a small car's nightmare. The first part of the day is a flat glide through small-town Texas - Guthrie, Benjamin, Vera, Seymour - like I'm passing through lives of people I know. And the land itself, dormant now, and brown, bracing for wind and snow and ice, and soon enough, Texas heat. The sky remains open, big, the far-as-the-eye-can-see horizon. I stop to piss and eat the leftovers of last night's ribs and brisket. It's an interstate exit, a crossing road and empty field, nothing more. The road to Geronimo.

Lily Thomas Field, near Geronimo, Oklahoma

I'm thankful to get off of the interstate at Newport, 435 miles in Tennessee this afternoon, an hour to go. It's well after dark, but I know the road home all too well. I see my first Confederate battle flag in six weeks. Hwy. 25-70 east is quiet, empty really, and I see no cars until I get to Hot Springs. It's not a warm night, but I open the windows to breath the mountains. I turn on Waylon Jennings singing a Billy Joe Shaver song, Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me. And the resinous line: "Willy, he tells me that doers and thinkers say movin' is the closest thing to being free."

January 10, 2016 Rob Amberg

I'm nearing the end of this trip and, over the last few stops, I've veered from my original intent of slow. Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico offers me the opportunity to, once more, surrender to the elements and the intensity of empty spaces, this one now inhabited by the ghosts and artifacts of long-ago cultures. But I'm resistant and think of innumerable excuses not to go. Time, the weather, a suspect road, "I can see it another time." Down deep, though, I know I'm avoiding this last chance to connect with myself, to experience the aloneness I had so forcefully demanded at the beginning of this journey.

I get there mid-afternoon. The road in is, as my friend Paul suggested, nothing I haven't driven before in Madison County. There are deep ruts and washboarding along the eighteen miles of unmaintained dirt road and I'm thankful it has dried after a snow two days earlier. It's going to be cold tonight, low twenties, but at Kate's suggestion I bought a sleeping bag liner and I'm hopeful it will be enough. There are few visitors in the Park and I set up camp in a small side canyon that I have to myself.

I spend the rest of the day wandering around the ruins of this sprawling and once vital concentration of Native pueblos. From about 850 A.D. to 1150 A.D., Chaco Canyon was the major center of life, culture and economy for the Ancient Pueblo People. It was abandoned in about year ten of what became a 50-year drought. The Park preserves the largest and one of the most important pre-Columbian historical sites in the United States.

It's is a humbling place. Arriving here after visiting three of our most modern cities, and the engineering marvel of Hoover Dam, it's unnerving to know that at any one time there were as many as 5,000 inhabitants of Chaco Canyon. It was a major trade route and religious center that had its own engineering marvels in its building techniques, agriculture and irrigation.

All Americans should be required to visit this place.

Back at camp, I'm visited by a couple from Germany who are car-camping out by the road. They are full of questions about Indians, relations with the government and white people, and the history. I relate my left-leaning take on all of it, which they seem to understand and appreciate. As we're saying our farewells, the man asks, "Do you feel safe here? In the middle of a reservation, with the history between Natives and whites, do you feel safe?" I assure him that I do.

The sun drops behind the canyon wall early, followed by a lack of light so complete I feel I'm revisiting my darkroom. The cold comes next, shirtsleeves by day, long underwear by night. I build a fire with my remaining Kelsey-cut kindling and make a warm supper of rice, Benny's pickled eggplant, sausage and a hard-boiled egg. I chase it with nephew Dave's ginger moonshine.

I put out the lantern and sit by the now iffy fire, wrapped in my heavy jacket against the heightening cold. I write some, but what to say. The enormity of the sky at 6,500 feet is impossible to describe with words or photographs. The stars, millions of them, are close and almost touchable. I'm so alone and so small here. No sound, no light, no people. I am safe.

I see a faint blinking light in the sky - an airplane so high above me I hear no sound. Filled with passengers, I imagine, on a path toward Las Vegas or LA, who know nothing of my presence below them in this ancient, abandoned metropolis. Minutes later, I see another, and then another, seven in all, same flight path, same lack of sound, only that blinking light announcing a world beyond.

The cold finally drives me to the relative warmth of my tent and sleeping bag. I wake well before dawn to see the sunrise, which my friend Charlie says is the main reason to be here. There is a heavy layer of ice on the tent and my car and I quickly make coffee, craving something warm and jolting.

Sunrise is the gift I've been promised and I welcome its light and warm embrace. I hear a slight flapping of wings and glimpse a shadow crossing the canyon floor. I look up to the shadow's host, a raven, sailing to a perch in the canyon wall, out of sight.

January 8, 2016 Rob Amberg

Grave Marker, US Highway 95 and Nevada State Road 266, Nevada

Little in my life has prepared me for Nevada. Over 90% of the state's residents live in urban areas and as I drive through this stark, barren and harsh land it's easy to see why. Steep, craggy mountains set in high desert without a hint of water anywhere. I skirt California for much of the day and pass roads to Death Valley that I want to take, but don't. Next Gas 120 miles. This would be a hard place to live and an easy place to die, and there is little that speaks of a human presence - a grave marker, an abandoned store with a For Sale billboard out front. But the place is inviting for that very lack of distraction, and the clarity it offers, the comfort and ease of just you and the landscape. I realize I've made few people photographs on this trip and on this piece of empty Nevada highway, I begin to understand why.

Nevada State Road 266 at US Highway 95, to Lida, Nevada

My cousin, Jean Pardee, has always been high on my list of favorite Ambergs so stopping to visit in southern Nevada was a no-brainer. Jean is the daughter of my dad's older brother, Stan, and was raised, and lived most of her life, in Chicago, my father's hometown. Jean and I share great memories from childhood, specifically an all-important recipe for cinnamon toast that I cherish to this day. Jean and Greg moved to Henderson seven years ago and love it. After some initial misgivings due to Las Vegas's crashing economy during the 2008 meltdown, they've settled into retirement and their new place. Golf, sunshine, warm days through three seasons and good AC in the fourth, easy drives to parks and hiking, a comfortable and welcoming home with good neighbors.

I've never had much of a desire to visit Las Vegas, but I'm here and have tour guides, so we go. First, we head up to Red Rock Canyon, a National Conservation Area west of town. We get in a short walk and watch a number of young people climbing and bouldering in the rocks. I think of Kate.

Driving through town it's clear Las Vegas has recovered from its economic doldrums. New infrastructure is going in throughout town. Existing housing developments are expanding and new ones are sprawling farther into the surrounding desert. New hotels and casinos are being built downtown and cranes dot the horizon. Greg says that McCarran Airport gets over 3 million people flying into Vegas every month. I wonder about water, given the parched nature of the place, but Greg believes it isn't an issue, that there is an ever- replenishing supply of water in underground storage to last ten years.

The strip is about what I expect - loud and pricey, the height of temptation - and it's here I see my fair share of those 3 million visitors. People eating, gambling, walking around half naked, walking in expensive clothing, singing in the street, yelling and screaming at their partners. The casinos are over-the-top in every conceivable way and seem to assault the senses with sounds and lights and smells, all in an effort to lure you in and take your money.

Later that night, heading out to eat, we crest a hill in their darkened neighborhood and get a glimpse of the city below - awash with light, like so many twinkling, unseen stars.