Linda Foard Roberts: Lament a Photographic Geography of Black History in the American South

Lament, a song of sorrow for those not heard, connects the tangibility of history and the geography of memory in the American South.

Through contemporary photographs, historical essays, personal stories, and critical quotes, Linda Foard Roberts's latest book explores the ways history exists all around us, whether tangible or intangible. Employing Civil War era technology--a 8-x-10-inch view camera with a Darlot brass barrel lens--for this project Roberts visited sites across the American South where important, sometimes devastating, events in social history took place. This use of historic technology invokes the temporal merging that she seeks to capture in her work--the overlays of evidence of our past and present.

Roberts sees her photographic efforts as an ongoing contribution to truth-seeking by pointing out the silent stories encoded in our surroundings. Her work examines life, death, basic human rights, and excavations of narratives invisibly embedded in our lives.