Lament

Through contemporary photographs, personal stories, essays, and quotes, Lament connects the tangibility of history and the geography of memory to a greater understanding of the palpable presence of our shared past in everyday life. For this project, Roberts employed Civil War-era equipment—an 8x10-inch view camera with a Darlot brass barrel lens—and visited sites across the American South where devastating events in social history have taken place. This use of historical equipment invokes the temporal merging she seeks to capture in her work—the overlap of the evidence of our past with the present. In an ongoing effort to seek truth, the artist bears witness to the silent stories encoded in our surroundings. Her work examines life, death, human rights, and excavations of narratives invisibly embedded in our lives. Roberts has seen how such endeavors can create opportunities for change, compassion, action, and justice. Lament is designed in two volumes housed in a cloth-covered slipcase. The first volume focuses on her images, while the second volume comprises texts by scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ph.D., Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., Michelle Lanier, and Jennifer Sudul Edwards, Ph.D., and a poem by E. Ethelbert Miller.