Andrew Stern: Appalachian Portfolio

Opening Reception Friday, October 7, 6-8pm | Exhibition up through Saturday, October 29, 2011

Read The C-Ville review and interview with Stern.

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The Appalachian Portfolio, 1959-1963, was inspired by Andrew Stern’s wife, Mary Lou Wyatt Stern, who came from Appalachia coal country. Subsequently, a story in The New York Times prompted Stern to travel to Whitesburg and Harlan County, Kentucky. Over a four-year period, he generated over 900 images. The photographs were widely displayed, including at a Senate hearing on President Johnson’s War on Poverty Program. Later, Stern produced a PBS documentary using the images and sound interviews. The broadcast was nominated for an Emmy.

According to Kate Black, University of Kentucky Archivist:

Stern’s photographs are socially concerned but they do not reflect common stereotypes of mid twentieth century rural poverty, nor do they depict residents of Appalachia as the “exotic other.” Stern’s eastern Kentuckians are neither relics of the past nor depraved aberrations. His body of Appalachian work does not contain a single photograph of a soiled child pressed against a dirty window peering forlornly out to a world she can’t dream of inhabiting. Instead, it includes a portrait of a girl outside her bare-bones home finger-painting on a warm spring day as her dogs relax nearby. The facts of her material existence are not hidden but neither is the presence of her creative spirit.

Stern captured on film a particular sociological/historical moment in the Appalachian coal fields but did so before these same subjects were represented by a media lens that more often than not—no matter how well-intentioned–tended to portray Appalachians as poverty objects, available for consumption on the nightly news or in weekly news magazines. Andrew Stern captured with his lens the last moments before an iconic Appalachia became forever emblazoned on the American cultural consciousness.

Stern used a Nikon F1, a Rolleiflex, plus X and Tri X film. The negatives were scanned with an Imacon Photo Scanner, carbon ink prints were made on an Epson 3800 with archival Innova Fiba-print Gloss paper.

The Appalachian Portfolio has been included in international publications and has been exhibited at the University of Kentucky at Lexington, the University of Louisville, Godbey Gallery in Cumberland, KY, the Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY, and Dartmouth College, NH.