Linda Foard Roberts made the photographs for Lament across sites in the American South where events of profound social consequence occurred. She did not arrive with a modern camera. Instead she worked with an 8×10-inch view camera and a Darlot brass barrel lens, equipment dating to the Civil War era. That decision is not nostalgic. The slow, deliberate process of large-format photography, combined with the optical character of a nineteenth-century lens, produces images in which past and present seem to occupy the same plane. Roberts is after what the publisher calls the overlap of evidence of our past with the present, and the pictures bear witness to stories that landscapes and buildings hold without speaking.
The book treats history as something tangible and intangible at once. Photographs are joined by personal stories, essays, and quotations that connect the material record of the past to the geography of memory. The contributors include Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cheryl Finley, Michelle Lanier, and Jennifer Sudul Edwards, with a poem by E. Ethelbert Miller. Their presence gives the project a discursive range beyond the single authorial voice, situating Roberts’s images within scholarship and reflection on race, history, and memory in the American South.
Radius Books has designed Lament as two hardcover volumes in a cloth-bound slipcase. The first volume is given to Roberts’s photographs: 146 pages and 73 images. The second, 56 pages with four images, carries the texts and the poem. This division is structural, not incidental. It allows the photographs to be encountered as a sequence before the writing expands the frame, and it gives the reader two distinct ways of moving through the same preoccupations. The slipcase holds them as a single work.
For a collection attuned to contemporary photography that engages historical trauma and Southern memory, Lament is a considered object. The commitment to a historic camera and lens, the pairing of image and scholarship, and the two-volume design all signal a project that takes its subject seriously in form as well as content. It belongs alongside other Radius Books titles that treat the photobook as a space for argument and reflection.
