LAMENT, About the book

Review by Deborah Willis, Ph.D.

"Lament" is truly an imaginative, enchanting, and transformative book that fuses memory, mourning, beauty, and grieving. What I learned from looking closely at the prints in this book is Linda Foard Roberts' love of words, nature, light, and the land. Each writer in this volume shares deeply personal reflections on their own experiences with Linda’s arresting photographs. Holding close to the complex history of architecture of the South while engaging with the metaphysical, Linda shifts time and space. She is refining, defining, and expanding the history of photography, memoir, and family history by recreating themes that employ a sense of longing and belonging. The contemplative images suggest a lost history rediscovered with hope through the lens of Linda Foard Roberts' work.

The embossed cover of the book has the etymology of the word Lament. To read these words, the book must be moved into the light, which is a metaphor for how these places of history exist all around us, but often it takes intention to truly see them

Through contemporary photographs, personal stories, essays, and quotes, Linda Foard Roberts's latest book 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.

Roberts sees her photographic efforts as an ongoing contribution to truth-seeking by bearing witness to the silent stories encoded in our surroundings. She has seen how such endeavors have the capacity to create opportunities for change, compassion, action, and justice.

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 took 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.

Her work examines life, death, fundamental human rights, and excavations of narratives invisibly embedded in our lives. 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.