The Appalachian Photographs of Earl Palmer
The Appalachian Photographs of Earl Palmer
JEAN HASKELL SPEER
Copyright Date: 1990
Edition: 1
Published by: University Press of Kentucky
Pages: 176
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130hvtm
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Book Info
The Appalachian Photographs of Earl Palmer
Book Description:

For more than fifty years mountain-born Earl Palmer traveled the Southern Appalachians with his camera, recording his personal vision of the mountain people and their heritage. Over these year he created, in several thousand photographs, a distinctive body of work that affirms a traditional image of Appalachia -- a region of great natural beauty inhabited by a self-sufficient people whose lives are notable for simplicity and harmony.

For this book, Jean Haskell Speer has selected more than 120 representative photographs from Palmer's collection and has written a biographical and critical commentary based on extensive interviews with the photographer. Palmer's photographs, Speer argues, are significant cultural statements that depict not so much a geographical region as a particular idea of Appalachia.

eISBN: 978-0-8131-4930-1
Subjects: History, Art & Art History, Sociology
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. vii-x)
  4. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. xi-2)

    One of the most ambitious photographic projects in American history was being widely publicized in 1905, the year Earl Palmer was born. Edward Curtis had begunThe North American Indian, a project that consumed Curtis’s whole life, resulted in twenty published volumes of photographs, and started a still unfinished critical controversy about the relationship between photographs and reality. According to Christopher Lyman’s study of Curtis, Curtis set out to document “the vanishing race” of the North American Indian but succeeded in reinforcing the mythological “imagery of Indianness.”¹ To achieve the desired impression, Curtis frequently posed his subject, provided costume and...

  5. Eternal Mountaineer
    Eternal Mountaineer (pp. 3-16)
  6. Portraits
    Portraits (pp. 17-28)
  7. Country Roads
    Country Roads (pp. 29-40)
  8. Making a Home in the Mountains
    Making a Home in the Mountains (pp. 41-52)
  9. Making a Living
    Making a Living (pp. 53-78)
  10. Made by Hand
    Made by Hand (pp. 79-102)
  11. Mountain Rituals
    Mountain Rituals (pp. 103-123)
  12. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 124-126)
  13. Selected Publications by Earl Palmer
    Selected Publications by Earl Palmer (pp. 127-128)
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