Nancy L Abrams

1953 St. Louis, Mo.

For more than 16 years, Nancy Abrams worked as a reporter and photojournalist for small newspapers in the rural, Appalachian communities around Preston County, West Virginia.  Abrams’ life and work personify the classic American outsider - a feminist, professional story-teller dropped into a closed society with narrowly defined gender roles.  Abrams covered diverse subjects from military exercises, local politics and the coal industry to crime, accidents, natural disasters and even the weather.  Abrams’ archive comprising 25,000 photographic negatives is an important and poignant archive of Allegheny culture in transition. 

Nancy's sensitive treatment of her subjects and her stories capture a universal humanity with extraordinary dignity.  Her photographic perspective has been compared to the work of Dorothea Lange, Lewis Wickes Hine and Walker Evans - who worked extensively in Preston County in 1935.