Restrictions to Access

No restrictions. Open for research.

Restrictions to Use

No usage restrictions.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Rob Amberg Photographs for Sodom Laurel Album #P0108, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Rob Amberg in May 2003 as a donation by Robin Hanes (Acc. 31138).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Amberg, Rob.
• Documentary photography--North Carolina--Madison County.
• Tobacco farmers--North Carolina--Madison County--Social life and customs--Photographs.

• Rob Amberg photographs and papers in the Archives of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

Rob Amberg was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947. Educated in Catholic schools, he graduated from the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, in 1969. While there, he produced a slide-tape presentation that introduced him to the potential of photography as a tool for social change. After college, he was granted Conscientious Objector status to the draft and spent two and a half years in Tucson, Ariz., teaching nursery school as his alternative service. In Tucson, Ariz., he produced his first published photographs and had his first one-person exhibit at Spectrum Gallery.

He moved to Madison County, N.C., in 1973 and began what has become his lifetime project; writing and photographing about the evolving culture and environment of his adopted county. His first book, Sodom Laurel Album, was published in 2002 by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the University of North Carolina Press. His second book from Madison County, The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia, was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. Throughout his career Amberg has been on staff or done assignment work for non-profit organizations and philanthropic foundations. His work has largely focused on rural communities, family farms, and the environment. His work is regularly published and exhibited nationally. He is the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the Center for Documentary Studies, and others. In 2004, he had the honor of presenting Sodom Laurel Album at the Library of Congress.

Since moving to the mountains, Amberg has sought to participate in mountain life as much as he’s documented it. He lives with his wife, Leslie Stilwell, on a small farm where they raise gardens and shitake mushrooms, tend an assortment of animals, burn firewood, and drink water from a mountain spring.

Biographical information taken from Rob Amberg's biography on RobAmberg.com, March 2016.

Collection consists of the 60 photographic prints used to produce Sodom Laurel Album (2002). Sodom Laurel Album, chronicles Dellie Norton and her family 1975-1994, who lived in the small mountain community of Sodom Laurel, located in Madison County, N.C. When Amberg first met Dellie Norton and her adopted son, Junior, in 1975, Norton was seventy-six years old and had lived most of her life in the small mountain community of Sodom Laurel, N.C., surrounded by close kin, tobacco fields, and the rugged wilderness of the southern Appalachians. Images chronicle the relationship between Norton and Amberg across the next two decades, years marked by the seasons of raising and harvesting food and tobacco and by the gatherings of family and friends for conversation, storytelling, and music. The collection also contains a copy of Sodom Laurel Album (2002).