Small Towns, Black Lives

This project became available online in 1995 as "The Cemetery." The site was an attempt to provide access to my earliest artworks that addressed history, memory, and memorial within the African American community. In the late 1990's the web project evolved to include a wider range of works and the project title became "Small Towns, Black Lives." To coincide with a large survey exhibition and the publication of the book version of the project, I created the final version of the web project in 2002. "The photographs in Wendel White¹s Small Towns, Black Lives are the kinds of hybrids Lange described and anticipated in her statement. The exhibition and book form a personal album revealing the layers of meaning and history that he carefully uncovered. His project to document African American communities in southern New Jersey began in much the same way that many photographers before him had set out to record a place or people." "Neither stridently documentary nor self-consciously arty, White¹s images straddle two worlds. They adopt the cool reserve of certain recent fine art photographers ­ Lewis Baltz, for example. Yet he is also true to the sincere lens of many of photography¹s great documentarians‹such as Lange or Jacob Riis, who documented the horrid slum conditions in New York¹s Lower East Side or Lewis Hine, who took part in the influential Farm Security Administration documentary project from 1937 to 1942. White has produced a body of work that is uniquely personal and profoundly informative. His photographs thoughtfully ask us to look without preconceptions at the history he has uncovered." -- Charles Ashley Stainback, Curator.