Lenoir, NC – Award-winning photographer Rob Amberg will show his work at the Happy Valley Filling Station in Lenoir July 1 – September 27, 2026.
Amberg has been photographing in the rural southeast for the last fifty years, focusing on rural communities, family farms and the environment. The show will include photographs from his three books about Madison County, NC: Sodom Laurel Album (2002), The New Road and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia (2009), and Little Worlds (2024).
When Rob 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 Sodom Laurel, NC in the southern Appalachians. Sodom Laurel Album traces the growing relationship between Norton and Amberg across the next twenty years during seasons of raising and harvesting food and tobacco, and gatherings of friends and family. Dellie Chandler Norton (1898 – 1993) was a much-loved storyteller and ballad singer, and a recipient in 1990 of a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award. Sodom Laurel Album was also an exhibition organized by the Asheville Art Museum and the (Duke University) Center for Documentary Studies.
Former NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell (1997 – 2002) wrote that “Madison County, in the deep mountains of western North Carolina, has been one of those ‘pockets’ whose poverty the federal government tried to eliminate. One means of elimination was to build through it Interstate 26, connecting this remote culture to the rest of the contemporary world. But at what cost? The New Road, Rob Amerbg’s powerful oral history and photographic document does not answer this question but displays it in an ambiguous and dramatic light.
Little Worlds completes a trilogy of books from Madison County where Rob and his wife Leslie Stilwell live on a small farm. NC author Ron Rash calls the book a “seamless merging of imagination, memory and artistry, bringing to mind the best of Walker Evans and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”
Rob Amberg was born in Washington, DC in 1947 and was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland. Educated in Catholic schools, he graduated from the University of Dayton in 1969. His work has been exhibited and published internationally, and he has received fellowships and awards from the Jon Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Documentary Studies, the NC Humanities Council and others.
A reception for the artist will be held on Wednesday, July 15 at 5pm at the Happy Valley Filling Station six miles north of Lenoir, NC.
The Filling Station is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11am to 9pm. Rob will have framed 16” x 20” images representative of all three books on fiber base paper, and a number of smaller unframed digital prints from the books, as well as from his recent work. All work is available for sale.
