"Little Worlds: When Life Imitates Art" Artist Talk and Book Signing with Photographer and Writer Rob Amberg

Rob Amberg will read and show work from "Little Worlds," the third volume in his trilogy of books from Madison County, North Carolina. This hybrid book intertwines Amberg's journal entries and photographs from his 50 years in the county with speculative fiction set 50 years into the future. Amberg will also show recent photographic work from Madison County in the aftermath of hurricane Helene and subsequent flooding and recovery efforts.

Rob Amberg is an award-winning photographer and writer whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. He has received fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Documentary Studies, and others, and his work is in numerous private and public collections.

"Little Worlds" completes a trilogy of books from Madison County, North Carolina. He lives with his wife, Leslie Stilwell, and their daughter, Kate, on a small farm in Western North Carolina. The first two books of the trilogy - "Sodom Laurel Album" and "The New Road" - document through photographs, oral history and narrative writing a traditional agrarian lifestyle and community and its evolution brought on by the construction of a new superhighway, improved access to the outside world, and a changing demographic. "Little Worlds" began as a bedtime story Amberg was telling his children and has grown to continue this story of change in Madison County. In many ways it is a traditional documentary photography book that utilize photographs and journal entries to tell a factual story about aspects of life in the county over the last fifty years. But the inclusion of speculative fiction, an imaginative look to a dystopian universe fifty years in the future through eyes from the past that brings the book its innovative energy.

"A compelling experimental documentary work that deftly crosses lines of traditional photographic expression, 'Little Worlds' is richly imbued with intersections of Amberg's three eloquent narratives-photographs, journal writings, and the imaginative stories of returning to a place drastically changed. 'Little Worlds,' like Amberg's other work, reveals the cultural fabric of the southern Appalachians through his singular artful and poetic voice." -Tom Rankin, Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and Director, MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, Duke University