Shelby Lee Adams is an American environmental portrait photographer, born on 24 October 1950 in Hazard, Kentucky. He spent much of his childhood with his grandparents near Hot Spot, and as a high school student he travelled with his uncle, a country doctor, on house calls in the hollows. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he discovered the Farm Security Administration photographs, at the University of Iowa and at the Massachusetts College of Art.
Since the mid-1970s he has returned to the mountains of eastern Kentucky to photograph Appalachian families, many over several generations. His books include Appalachian Portraits (1993), Appalachian Legacy (1998) and Appalachian Lives (2003), all from the University Press of Mississippi, Salt & Truth (Candela Books, 2011), From the Heads of the Hollers (GOST Books, 2023) and The Book of Life (Steidl, 2026). His method was debated in the documentary The True Meaning of Pictures.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. He is based in western Massachusetts and eastern Kentucky.
