Abrams Nancy L Junior Junior Deputies, Bruceton Mills 1976 Coll Rare Nest Gallery
Abrams Nancy L The Rutherfords with Their Coal Fellowsville 1977 Coll Rare Nest Gallery Chgo
Photographer Abrams’s archive of 20,000 images captured life in West Virginia.
CHICAGO, IL, UNITED STATES, June 12, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Rare Nest Gallery is proud to present photographs by Nancy L. Abrams
Nancy L Abrams
1953 St. Louis, Mo.
For more than 16 years, Nancy Abrams worked as a reporter and photojournalist for small newspapers in the rural, Appalachian communities around Preston County, West Virginia. Abrams’ life and work personify the classic American outsider – a feminist, professional story-teller dropped into a closed society with narrowly defined gender roles. Abrams covered diverse subjects from military exercises, local politics and the coal industry to crime, accidents, natural disasters and even the weather. Abrams’ archive comprising 20,000 images is an important and poignant archive of Allegheny culture in transition.
Nancy’s sensitive treatment of her subjects and her stories capture a universal humanity with extraordinary dignity. Her photographic perspective has been compared to the work of Dorothea Lange, Lewis Wickes Hine and Walker Evans – who worked extensively in Preston County in 1935.
Nancy L Abrams grew up in St. Louis. Her father was in the hospitality business and her mother was a dog breeder. In 1974, while a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Abrams took a 3-month internship in the small town of Terra Alta in the mountains of Preston County. That one summer prompted a life in the mountains. Abrams fell in and out of love, raised two sons — mostly as a single parent — and became a leader of a community-owned farm.
Her journalistic beat included a vast and beautiful terrain of mountains, forests, and rivers – a region with a perennially struggling economy. The period covered by Abrams’ archive included enormous cultural transition. In a state prone to caricature, one of Abrams’ greatest accomplishments may be the level of nuance she captures in her subjects and how these remarkable images illuminate humanity.
Abrams’ illustrated memoir, “The Climb from Salt Lick: A Memoir of Appalachia” was published by West Virginia University’s Vandalia Press in May, 2018. Abrams’ book is composed of 35 highly personal recollections with carefully curated images capturing the artist’s perspective.
Booklist Review of “The Climb”; The West Virginia mountains will either make you feel claustrophobic or energized and free, a pretty good indicator of how folks who move to the state will fare. Nancy Abrams was instantly enchanted when, as a naive, hippie-ish journalism student in 1974, she took an internship at the Preston County News. It was love at first sight, and in The Climb from Salt Lick, she writes eloquently about the landscape, capturing a feeling of awe and belonging often overlooked by other literature about the state. For the next decade, she traversed Preston County, covering war games, coal miners, school-consolidation protests, and the annual Buckwheat Festival. Meanwhile, she makes friends and smokes pot and has sex, eventually falling for Wilford Feather, a local man who offers to mow her lawn (literally) the morning after their first night together. His practical, mechanical knowledge and her attraction to the romance of rural domesticity make them good partners (that, and the sex), making it easy to overlook differences in education and ambition. For awhile, anyway. This is not the memoir of a failed marriage, though. It is sort of a reverse Hillbilly Elegy, the story of a young woman who flummoxes her family back in St. Louis by settling in remote, rural West Virginia, giving us a glimpse into hardscrabble living, small-town characters, and a slice of history. Especially charming is the chapter in which Abrams recalls the preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of Arthurdale, the planned community funded by the New Deal and championed by Eleanor Roosevelt. This is an endearing memoir of a relatively prosperous time (the 1970s were good for West Virginia coal), a woman who drives too fast chasing after stories, and a landscape that is long overdue for some appreciation.— Susan Maguire
Keith Bringe
Rare Nest Gallery Chicago
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Lunch With Books: “The Climb from Salt Lick” with author Nancy Abrams. Ohio County Public Library
Originally published at https://www.einpresswire.com/article/635695490/nancy-l-abrams-photos-captured-appalachia-in-transition
